Doesn't it just come down to what's in his contract? Many contracts now do include a clause assigning copyright to all employee code (even that written outside

Doesn't it just come down to what's in his contract? Many contracts now do include a clause assigning copyright to all employee code (even that written outside work) to the company. I would never sign such a contract, but it's a perfectly reasonable thing to put in one. In the absence of such an explicit clause I am pretty sure that copyright automatically belongs to the author of the code.