Corporate Authorship Rights in Turkey: Can a Company Own Copyright?

In Turkey a company generally cannot be the author of a copyrighted work, but it can hold and exercise the economic rights — usually only if you secure them by written contract. Turkish copyright law treats authorship as a human, personal act, so the common-law assumption that the employer automatically owns what its staff create does not apply, and the gap can leave valuable software, designs and content unprotected.

Can a Legal Entity Be an Author in Turkey?

Short answer: no. In Turkey only a natural person can be the legal author of a work. A company cannot be the author, but it can be the holder of the economic rights — and that is the position that actually matters for licensing, transfers and enforcement.

Copyright in Turkey is governed by the Law No. 5846 on Intellectual and Artistic Works (Fikir ve Sanat Eserleri Kanunu, FSEK). Its guiding rule is the creation principle (yaratma ilkesi): the person whose intellectual effort brings a work into existence is its author. The statute spells this out plainly — FSEK Art. 1/B defines the author as "the person who creates the work," and Art. 8 states that "the author of a work is the one who creates it." Because creation is a personal intellectual act, Turkish doctrine recognises only a human being as author.

This does not shut a company out of copyright. It means the company's role is normally that of an economic-rights holder rather than the author — a distinction with real consequences when you license, sell or defend the work. Getting that contractual architecture right from day one sits at the centre of our copyright and IP protection practice in Turkey and is exactly what is tested during corporate due diligence.

How Turkish Law Evolved on Corporate Authorship

Turkey's treatment of corporate authorship has shifted over the past century, which is why older assumptions about Turkish copyright are often out of date.

• 1910 Law and the original 1951 FSEK: Legal entities could, in defined situations, be treated as authors of works created by their employees or organs.
• 1995 amendment (Law No. 4110): The framework moved away from corporate authorship. Companies were generally limited to exercising the economic rights in employee-created works rather than holding author status.
• 2001 amendment (Law No. 4630, dated 21 February 2001): The position narrowed further, reinforcing the natural-person requirement and the idea that a legal entity exercises economic rights rather than being recognised as the creator.

One practical consequence is that a residual inconsistency survives in the text of the law. The clearest example is FSEK Art. 27/4, which still provides that "if the first author is a legal entity, the term of protection is 70 years from the date of publication." That wording assumes a legal entity can be a "first author" — a leftover from the older approach that sits awkwardly beside the natural-person rule the rest of the statute now follows. The lesson is not to rely on the default rules to settle ownership, but to fix it expressly by contract.

Employee-Created Works: Who Owns the Output?

The most common real-world question is ownership of works produced by staff: software, marketing material, architectural drawings, technical documentation and similar output.

The governing rule is FSEK Art. 18/2. Where civil servants, employees and workers create works in the course of performing their duties, the economic rights in those works are exercised by the person who employs or appoints them — "unless the contrary appears from a special agreement between them or from the nature of the work." The same paragraph adds that the rule applies to the organs of legal entities. Crucially, what passes to the employer is the authority to exercise the economic rights, not authorship and not the moral rights, which stay with the human creator.

This split — economic rights to the employer, moral rights and author status to the individual — is the heart of the issue. It is reinforced by the wider employment relationship: the employee's duty of loyalty and good faith comes from the Turkish Code of Obligations (TBK No. 6098, service-contract provisions at Art. 393 and following, with the loyalty duty in Art. 396). For the documentation side of staffing creative or technical teams, see our employment and labour law practice.

Who Owns Software Your Developers Write?

For foreign businesses, software is the number-one reason this question comes up — and it is where the most money is lost. Computer programs are expressly protected as works under FSEK (Art. 2), so the same authorship and economic-rights framework applies to your codebase.

Two fact patterns explain the trap:

• A Turkish employee on your payroll writes the code. Under FSEK Art. 18/2, the economic rights are exercised by you, the employer, by default — provided the work was produced in the course of their duties. A clear IP clause in the employment contract removes any doubt and is still strongly advisable.
• A foreign SaaS company hires a Turkish freelance developer. The freelancer is an independent contractor, so the employer-default does not apply. Without a signed assignment of economic rights, the developer keeps those rights — and the company that paid for the software may not be able to prove it owns it. The author status and moral rights stay with the developer in either case.

If you are putting AI coding assistants or third-party models into your development pipeline, the ownership picture gets more complex — see the AI section below and our technology and AI practice.

Economic Rights vs. Moral Rights Under FSEK

FSEK divides an author's rights into two categories, and the difference matters enormously for any company relying on creative or technical work.

Economic rights (mali haklar)

These are the commercially exploitable rights: reproduction (Art. 22), distribution (Art. 23), public performance (Art. 24), communication to the public including by broadcast and transmission (Art. 25), and adaptation/processing (Art. 21). Economic rights are transferable and licensable under Art. 48 and following. A company can acquire and exercise them, and these are the rights that carry value in a sale, a financing round or an M&A transaction.

Moral rights (manevi haklar)

These protect the personal bond between the human author and the work: the right to decide on disclosure (Art. 14), the right to be named as author (Art. 15), and the right to object to distortion or mutilation of the work (Art. 16). Moral rights stay with the natural-person author and cannot be sold outright or waived.

For a company the goal is therefore twofold: take a clean, written transfer of economic rights, and obtain appropriate undertakings from individual authors about the exercise of moral rights — for example, agreement not to object to ordinary commercial use — to the extent Turkish law allows. Our written IP assignment clauses are built to capture exactly this.

Does Turkey Have a Work-Made-for-Hire Rule?

No — not in the US sense. Turkey does not deem the employer the author of a qualifying work. The closest mechanism is FSEK Art. 18/2, which lets the employer exercise the economic rights in works employees create on the job, while author status and moral rights stay with the individual. Foreign clients usually arrive with expectations shaped by their home jurisdiction, so the comparison is worth setting out clearly.

On the international layer, the Berne Convention does not exhaustively define "author," and instruments such as TRIPS and the WIPO Copyright Treaty leave room for national variation — which is precisely why the Turkish domestic rules govern. Where a work crosses borders, conflict-of-laws questions arise and the Turkish Act on Private International and Procedural Law (MÖHUK No. 5718, Art. 23 on intellectual property) helps determine which country's law applies to ownership and protection.

AI-Generated Works and the Limits of Authorship

The debate over whether a company can be an author has a modern twin: works generated by artificial intelligence. Both raise the same question — can copyright attach where there is no human creator?

As of mid-2026, the answer in Turkey is no for purely autonomous output. FSEK's emphasis on personal intellectual effort and hususiyet (the distinctive personal stamp of the author) means machine-only output with no human author is not currently recognised as an "eser" (work) and receives no copyright protection. This mirrors the cautious position in the EU and the long-standing US requirement of human authorship.

One currency note: on 8 April 2026 a bill to amend FSEK No. 5846 was reported to the Turkish Parliament, addressing AI-generated outputs. As proposed, the commercial or professional use of AI outputs that substitute for, draw economic value from, or compete with protected works would be subject to licensing for an appropriate fee. It is a proposal, not yet law — until it is enacted, the natural-person rule continues to govern. We will update this guide if it passes.

For businesses deploying AI tools, the practical risk is real: output no one "authored" in the legal sense may sit outside copyright. Contracts, trade-secret and data protection safeguards, and careful records of human involvement become essential. We explore adjacent themes in our note on smart contracts and emerging legal technology.

What Goes Wrong in M&A Due Diligence

The cost of getting authorship wrong rarely shows up day to day. It surfaces at the moment of a transaction — a financing round, a share sale, an acquisition — when a buyer's lawyers test whether the company actually owns what it claims to own.

The recurring failure is a target that cannot prove clean title to its own code or content because the economic rights were never assigned. Typical consequences:

• Chain-of-title gaps: code written by freelancers or an outsourced studio with no signed assignment, so the rights still sit with the individuals — not the company being bought.
• Price chips and holdbacks: once a gap appears in diligence, buyers discount the price or hold back part of it until ownership is fixed.
• Reps-and-warranties exposure: sellers warrant that they own their IP; an unassigned codebase turns that warranty into a live liability and can trigger indemnity claims after closing.
• Deal delay or collapse: remediating dozens of missing assignments under time pressure is slow, and sometimes a key contributor cannot be found or will not sign.

Clean, written assignments from day one are exactly what diligence looks for — and exactly what avoids these problems. Our Corporate & M&A team runs this kind of IP due diligence and remediation on both buy-side and sell-side mandates.

Enforcement: What You Can Do If Your Rights Are Infringed

Holding the rights is only half the picture; FSEK also gives a rights-holder concrete tools when those rights are violated.

• Civil remedies: you can sue to stop and remove an infringement — an action to prevent the infringement (tecavüzün men'i) and to remove its effects (tecavüzün ref'i) under FSEK Art. 66 and following — and claim compensation for material and moral damage.
• Account of profit / increased damages: FSEK allows the rights-holder, in defined circumstances, to claim several times the amount that would have been payable under a licence, giving the remedy real bite.
• Criminal provisions: certain infringements are offences under FSEK Art. 71 and following, prosecuted on the rights-holder's complaint.
• Interim measures: the court can order precautionary measures to freeze infringing activity while the case proceeds.

Practical Steps for Foreign Companies in Turkey

Whatever the theoretical answer on authorship, a company can almost always secure effective control of its creative assets through good documentation. Recommended steps:

1. Written IP clauses in every employment and service contract, expressly transferring or confirming the company's right to exercise the economic rights in work product.
2. Separate, explicit assignments for independent contractors and freelancers, who are not covered by the FSEK Art. 18/2 employer-default — this is the single most common gap.
3. Moral-rights undertakings from individual authors, to the extent permitted, addressing attribution and non-objection to ordinary commercial use.
4. Documentation of the creative process, recording who contributed what and when — useful for both enforcement and due diligence, and decisive for AI-assisted work.
5. Registration and filings where they add value: voluntary software registration, plus steps to protect related trademarks and registered designs.

These measures matter most at moments of transaction stress, when a buyer's lawyers will test whether you own what you claim. To discuss your situation, contact Lexin Legal for tailored advice. The general points above are not a substitute for review by a Turkish lawyer.

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