Unarchiving fees?

[Daniel Hoffman]

oh man. It sure does get complicated. I guess I just wonder why so many different disciplines (acting, music, photo, etc.) have rights agreements, but graphic artists don’t.

http://www.danielforresthoffman.com

[Todd Terry]

[Daniel Hoffman] ” I guess I just wonder why so many different disciplines (acting, music, photo, etc.) have rights agreements, but graphic artists don’t.”

Well, your rights are are what you decide for them to be, and you can certainly craft future agreements with that in mind and only license specific works for specific projects and require fees for re-use… that is certainly totally doable.

You might get some blowback from your clients, though, they’re just not used to doing it that way.

In a similar vein, our commercial production agreements provide a finished production… a client does not own or have the rights to any elements that make it up. Nor do they own raw footage we have shot. We spell that out very explicitly in our contracts. Also, while they own the rights to the finished project, they only have rights to its use as is… they cannot, for example, lift a shot out of a commercial we produced and use it in another one somewhere else (and yes, we’ve had that exact thing happen). But we can really only effectively exercise that right because we spell it out in our agreements in advance… otherwise, it might get ugly.

We recently had a client (an attorney) ask for his raw footage, because he found someone cheaper to do some web commercials for him. Our response was “Certainly,” and gave him a price for the rights to use it. His only response was an email saying “Hmmm that’s kinda expensive” (which it wasn’t), and we never heard from him again. In his case, he wasn’t really our client… he was our client’s client (his ad agency hired us). So not only was this guy trying to get his footage for free, but he was doing an end-run around the very advertising agency he hired to do the whole thing in the first place. He didn’t get very far.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com