Legal Question in Intellectual Property in California

No I think you have more of an independent contractor situation, which means that you need to reach some contractual agreement assigning the copyright to you. Otherwise, he might have a claim for some portion of the royalties. In other words, you would be joint owners. I might be mistaken in this opinion, but you would be wise to get an assignment of all rights as a pre-condition to "employment. Further, if he is an "employee" then you are required to carry workers compensation insurance and pay SDI.

I agree that this sounds more like an independent contractor situation and that the employer-employee copyright ownership rules would not apply, or at least that the hired professional would have a strong argument for shared ownership. There's a pretty strong tendency in the law not to allow the fruits of an independent contractor relationship to inure to an "employer" without also causing him to bear the burdens. If you want the professional to be an employee for some purposes, you'll have to treat him as an employee for all purposes - workers' comp, withholding, etc. and get an employer identification number.

Much easier to get an assignment and release.

I'd recommend hiring an intellectual-property attorney as worth the fee, but a possible low-cost alternative would be to get one or two of those paperback self-help law books covering writers' and artists'needs in the copyright area.

Finally, I'd suggest copyrighting your final versions of "words and sentiments" yourself, before turning them over for fine-tuning. You would then have some protection against misappropriation by the contractor or others by creating (and profiting from) derivative works too close to your copyrighted drafts.

Under Copyright law, an employee is generally a full time person whose job includes creating the copyrighted material. For anyone else, you need a written agreement saying the work is a "work made for hire" under Copyright law, and that the hiring company or person is the author for copyright purposes.

Before you hire anyone to help you, you should put down in writing what you have and register the copyright. Even though copyright attaches automatically, having the registration certificate can be helpful in proving that you did, in fact, create the work. And, by the way, if your prospective hired writer doesn't want to sign away rights, then don't use him/her. You're just buying a problem.

If you expect your work to have value, then don't scrimp and try to avoid hiring a lawyer to save a few pennies. Good legal work costs nothing because you will earn or save much more than it costs. Get an experienced entertainment lawyer (who knows what he's doing) to help you with your contracts. He can make sure you're protected and don't have problems down the road.

For a more complete discussion of copyright and other legal issues related to the entertainment industry, I recommend "What Every Filmmaker Needs to Know About the Law," a user-friendly DVD series with companion books available at the website of the same name.