Legal advice: Do I own the copyright to a chart I designed?

A nurse has designed a chart for recording patient observations and data. Copyright and entitlement to payment can depend on your contract, advises legal expert Marc Cornock

If you don’t own the copyright to the chart, you are not entitled to payment when it is reproduced.

Factors which need to be considered to determine whether you own the rights to the chart include whether it was designed as part of your working duties, whether you used other charts to help you design the new one, and what is stated in your contract.

The following should help put this into context: when I was a critical care nurse many years ago, we had an unexpected slow couple of days (hard to imagine now, I know!)