Commercial release forms for art...

[manimani]

Hi,

We are in the process of sourcing artwork and were looking for advice on owning the commercial rights to artwork an artist makes for us.
Is it implied that by paying for the artwork and stating in your email corespondence that it is for a paid game that you own the commercial rights.
What should you do to protect yourself and what should you watch out for?

[lennard]

I've got a boilerplate contract that I change for each project - I'd be happy to clean it up and post it here if it would be of use to you (and possibly others in the future). I'm a programmer not an artist so no warranty expressed or implied but... it doesn't make sense to me to pay legal fees that could be going towards artwork every time I do a small contract with an artist.

[manimani]

That would be great Lennard, thanks. Nice to have something on paper.

[narrat]

I'd like to take a look at it too if you don't mind lennard, I was going to ask OP's question myself.

[lennard]

I've decided to pass out the contract via email so I've responded offline to manimani. Narrat please email me a link to your website and I'll send you a copy of the contract I use.

[James Coote]

I used a site called simply docs, where you sign up for £50 or something and get a bunch of template contracts for all sorts of things, that you just fill in the blanks for. Wondering if anyone else uses these kind of sites or have ever run into issues when using contracts.

Also the contracts I used were for perpetual exclusive licenses rather than actually transferring the copyright on the work. Is that fairly normal for the industry?

[lennard]

James, if I was paying somebody to create something for me then I would expect a work for hire where I own the images outright. This perpetual exclusive license could have a number of ramifications. For example:

Can you resell the artwork that you paid to have created?

If your company is bought does the license transfer?