Every answer is a claim until something checks it

1. Who will own the code, the domain and the accounts when it's paid for? These are three different things. The code is covered by copyright, and the next section quotes what the law says about it. The domain and the hosting sit in accounts. A checkable answer names each account, whose name and email it's registered to, and who holds the login. All of that can be confirmed by logging in.

2. What does "done" mean for this project? "Done" at the end of a project is a sentence somebody says. A checkable answer is a list agreed before work starts: which pages, which forms send to which inbox, which phones and browsers it's looked at on. Then there's a record that each item was checked, which the buyer can read or repeat.

3. What will the site depend on that someone else controls? A website builder, a plugin, a paid form service, fonts or scripts loaded from another company's servers. Each one is a bill, a login or a thing that can change without warning. A checkable answer is a list, with who pays for each item and what happens to the site if it stops.

4. Who will actually do the work, and how? A checkable answer names the person building it, says whether anyone else will touch it, and says what tools they use, AI included. It's checkable later: the person named is the person in the conversations.

5. What happens when something breaks after launch, and what does it cost? "We'll look after you" is a claim. A checkable answer is written terms: what's included, for how long, and the price of anything outside that.

6. What's left if we stop working together? A checkable answer lists the handover: the files, every login, and a short record of how the site is put together. The test is whether another developer could pick it up without calling the first one.

In the United Kingdom, section 11(1) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 provides that "the author of a work is the first owner of any copyright in it." Section 11(2) makes the employer the first owner where a work "is made by an employee in the course of his employment", "subject to any agreement to the contrary." Section 90(3) provides that "an assignment of copyright is not effective unless it is in writing signed by or on behalf of the assignor."1

In the United States, copyright "vests initially in the author or authors of the work" under 17 U.S.C. §201(a). A "work made for hire" is either a work prepared by an employee within the scope of employment, or a specially ordered or commissioned work in one of nine listed categories where "the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them" (§101). Under §204(a), a transfer of copyright ownership, "other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner's duly authorized agent."2

None of these sections mentions payment. Outside employment, every route they describe for the commissioning business to hold the copyright runs through a signed writing.

This is not legal advice.

The answers in the claim column are made-up examples, not quotes from anyone.

These are the answers on my own service pages, read on 3 October 2026, so they can be held to the list above.

• Ownership. "On final payment I sign a one-page copyright assignment to you, so it's yours in law, not only in name."3
• Leaving. "… plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, no framework and no builder account. If you never speak to me again it keeps working, and any developer can pick it up." A build ends with "a handover package".3
• Who builds it. "I direct it, AI writes the code, and the decisions and the checks are mine. There is no account manager between you and the person building it."3
• Dependencies. The two client sites rebuilt in September each made 0 third-party calls when measured on 2 October 2026.3
• Done. The checks a build goes through before release are written out on How I ship.
• After launch. A rebuild includes someone watching the fortnight after launch, "when a missed redirect shows itself." Changes and fixes after launch are booked by the day, at €250 a day as of 3 October 2026.3

I looked for a measurement of how often a business finds out that its code, domain or hosting isn't in its own name. I couldn't find one. The surveys that came up count businesses with no domain at all, which is a different question.

• What a particular contract does. Only the statute text was read: no case law, and no other country's law, Latvia's and the rest of the EU's included.
• Whether a website falls into one of the nine US work-for-hire categories. The statute lists them; applying them is a legal question.
• That these six questions are the complete set. They're the ones this site's work turns on.
• How often any of these go wrong. Nobody has measured it, as far as I could find.