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“Digi Grill” by Oliver Barrett of Go Media for Jakprints<br />
A “work for hire” contract is different than other contracts in that you lose<br />
absolutely ALL rights to your work including authorship rights (the ability<br />
to say you even created the work) and promotional rights (in your portfolio)<br />
in perpetuity (FOREVER). This sort of contract is <strong>not</strong> needed at all to<br />
reproduce the work and can only be considered a legal rape of the artist’s<br />
rights. This sort of legal abuse is considered unethical to much of the artist<br />
community and damaging to the artist profession as whole.<br />
A WFH (work-for-hire) contract legally treats the artist as if they were a paid<br />
employee without providing all the perks and benefits of being an actual<br />
salaried employee like regular pay, sick pay, social security, vacation time,<br />
lunch breaks, insurance etc.<br />
The best route would be to hire a lawyer to go over your contracts, but since<br />
<strong>not</strong> everyone has the funds for something like that, the next best thing is<br />
to do your own research through books and the Internet about contracts<br />
and legal terms. Try to protect your rights by watching for and removing<br />
phrases like “in perpetuity” and “work-for-hire.” – Munk One<br />
Sadly many companies try to force you to sign a WFH contact before they pay<br />
you. Protect yourself before starting any project by always asking for the con-<br />
THREAD’S NOT DEAD • Jeff Finley<br />
tract you will be signing or better yet create your own and have it approved<br />
before starting on the project.<br />
If for some reason you do choose to sign one of these contracts, at least make<br />
sure the price of the art is significantly higher than the usual fee in order to<br />
cover the money that could have been made off of it in the future.<br />
Get Permission Before You Post!<br />
Here’s a story of how Go Media got in trouble for showing off our work. We’ve<br />
been in that “invisible” situation before but never really thought much of it.<br />
We’ve posted work in our portfolio and even wrote tutorials about how we did<br />
it. We didn’t think we needed permission. Big mistake.<br />
We were actually called by the manager of a legendary 80’s band (I can’t give<br />
the name) demanding us to remove the work from our site. Apparently the designs<br />
we were showing were <strong>not</strong> approved or even seen by the band. Word got<br />
back to them after seeing the design pop up on fan message boards who were<br />
talking about new merchandise.<br />
Freelancing 25
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