Copywriting portfolio – what content can a copywriter include in his/her portfolio?
Legal aspects can cause a lot of confusion in copywriting. This is not surprising, because the profession is developing dynamically, and with it it is creating new strategies among writers to outperform the competition. One of them is a portfolio, which is not always built legally. Find out what to pay attention to to build a safe and effective copywriting portfolio!
How to properly build a portfolio?
In practice, a copywriter’s portfolio most often contains examples of texts from various industries or particular types (background texts, product descriptions, blog articles, etc.). No writer has any doubts that such a set of prepared materials is a good marketing move – potential clients can easily check their competences, which will increase interest in the offer and usually eliminate the need to write additional “trial texts”.
However, the question arises which texts can be included in the portfolio. Is it only your own content, created specifically for this purpose, or is it also content ordered by the client and paid for? The answer can be found in the Copyright Act and also… in the arrangements between the parties!
Copyright and portfolio
The copywriter has economic and personal copyrights to the created texts.
The first of them are sold – thanks to this, the customer can use the content for commercial purposes. The latter, on the other hand, are inalienable and prove that authorship cannot be gotten rid of. This means that the copywriter is the undeniable creator of all his content and no one has the right to take this title away from him.
Hence it clearly follows that he can always sign his texts, right? Well, not entirely. Customers can reserve this option without losing their personal copyrights. The appropriate provision in the contract plays a decisive role.
If the client does not want his texts to appear in the portfolio, before establishing cooperation, he draws up an agreement in which the copywriter undertakes not to exercise personal copyrights.
This means that he does not lose his rights, but only declares that he will not use them (e.g. to build a portfolio). This solution cleverly circumvents the issue of inalienability and clearly illustrates how the terms of cooperation can be dictated by market needs.
See also
Summary
- Can a copywriter insert any client’s text into a portfolio? Unfortunately not.
- To avoid misunderstandings, the issue of exercising personal copyrights should be mutually agreed upon.
- The rules should be clearly defined in the contract signed before the cooperation begins.
- Thanks to this, unnecessary conflicts and differences will be avoided, and the implementation of texts will be based on transparent conditions.
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