License and compensation advice?
So, I've been approached by a commercial game engine about using one of my portfolio-pieces as-is for their demo, and just thought I'd swing this by you lovely hairy man-creatures for some advice:
1. Basically, what rights should I ask to retain to what is already all mine?
It seems like retaining all the rights to my work, plus the rights to use parts of it in other work, while still giving this client the right to show it off and distribute everything but the source files themselves is a possibility, which sounds like a good deal to me - is there anything else I need to know?
2. What kind of compensation would be reasonable to ask for in a case like this? The work done, the work to be done to get it running, plus something for their right to distribute it?
Thanks!
1. Basically, what rights should I ask to retain to what is already all mine?
It seems like retaining all the rights to my work, plus the rights to use parts of it in other work, while still giving this client the right to show it off and distribute everything but the source files themselves is a possibility, which sounds like a good deal to me - is there anything else I need to know?2. What kind of compensation would be reasonable to ask for in a case like this? The work done, the work to be done to get it running, plus something for their right to distribute it?
Thanks!
Replies
Consider why they might want the asset. Does it directly relate to what they're doing? Or could it easily be interchanged with someone elses asset?
Decide how much it would have cost you to make. Consider how valuable it might be to them. Find a price point that both parties are comfortable with.
This has worked for me in the past.
You've already built it, you're never going to get that time back or paid for, retroactively. If a friend was making a toy engine and wanted to use it, you wouldn't charge them. Why is it different for a company?
It's a little greedy to expect to make money off of something that costs you nothing after you've made it, isn't it? It's not like you're making it all over again each time someone wants to use it. Why not just say "sure, here it is, make sure it says I made this in big letters somewhere people can find it, and give me a link to send people to when they want to see my model in your engine," and just give it to them?
lol really?
I think I get what you're saying? This doesn't fall into the realm of chargeable service and I'm leaning that way too. But if they're offering money and its up to him to come up with a reasonable price, why give it away? It also sounds like they want him to do some extra work putting it in their engine? So in that case I think some kind of compensation is in order.
If the company is going to use his work to show off their demo to make them money, he has every right in the world to make money for his work. Were you serious?
musicians and film studios already did the work too. i guess they dont need to be paid. not paying for games is ok too, since the games are already made.
I don't care about your personal choice, I just want you to understand why you're making it.
For rasmus, I like Jay Evans' idea. It's a good idea. Try that. Get them to distribute your model on their developer network with your name credited, and now your work gets seen by every licensee.
For everyone else, if you are making something with the expectation that you will be able to sell it over and over and over again (e.g. royalties, licensing, etc.), even though it doesn't cost you anything to resell it after your initial time investment, understand that doesn't make any economic sense.
Slum's comment about musicians is a great example. Once the musician has made the song -- and if you have a record deal you're essentially doing it as work-for-hire and own nothing yourself -- distributing an MP3 of that song costs practically nothing. Sheet music publishers and record labels were invented to and distribute physical media, each piece of which costs time and effort and materials to reproduce, but emailing someone a PDF of sheet music or pointing them to a Rapidshare MP3 file costs nothing.
If rasmus wants to make money from adapting the model to use in their engine, great. He's doing actual work he can charge money for. But to charge for something that doesn't require any cost or effort? I find that to be disingenuous at best.
The question you should be asking is, why? The physical disc and packaging and shipping cost like $2. They want to recoup the investment they made? Okay, but at some point they've recouped it. They want to recoup and make enough to pre-fund the sequel? Fine. Why doesn't the DVD price go down to $2 after that, and it's free online or to fileshare forever?
Expecting to make money forever without working doesn't make any sense. You should be questioning why the system functions as it does instead of blindly doing the same thing because that's what everyone else does. Try to understand where that magic money comes from and why.
Think for yourself. Your world doesn't have to work that way. You can choose to work and sell the efforts of your labor any way you want. I just want you to consider if you are, in fact, exerting effort and laboring. If you're not, you might consider feeling a little guilty when someone cuts you a check and you didn't do anything to deserve it.
I too would like all of your artistic pursuits sent to me please. If you've made some furniture or anything else I'd take that too? I promise to give you good exposure.
Since "all art is never finished only abandoned in a near perfect state" I would give them the model but sell them a 10 year service warranty. They would be entitled to any and all updates for free but no updates are required.
Death might take me before I finish all the art I've started but that doesn't mean it was actually finished...
No, this would be you making money without exerting effort. Besides, all the models I've ever made are on Turbosquid already, for free. Plus, I was originally a consultant for Turbosquid before launch, so nyah.
Just because you might be able to make a few bucks off it, doesn't mean you should try. If you made it for yourself, then you've already gotten the personal satisfaction of making it. Why can't that be enough? Are the "few bucks" you might get worth depriving someone else of something they could imagine and create using your work as a shoulder to stand on?
You're right, working for free is silly. If you're actually exerting effort, then of course you shouldn't do that for free.
But, once you're done exerting effort, can you really argue that you deserve to continue making money? Ignore the legal foundation behind it. I grow you an apple, you eat it, it has nourished you and helped you live. Since you will live for 50 more years, in part because of that apple you ate, should you pay me royalties for the rest of your life?
Or did you just buy an apple from me, and if I want more money from you, I should grow you another apple?
Why are 2D paintings or 3D models any different?
By your reasoning shouldnt adobe and autodesk give me thier products for free because they are finished working on that version?
I dont get why artists cannot stand as a single front to try and help each other out instead of devaluing everyone elses work with false ideals...
@ rasmus: if you're interested in being able to re-license it then you might want to charge less, perhaps offer lower cost re-use vs exclusive use outright buy (with the proviso that you can portfolio pimp it as has been said)
Unfortunately most of us live in a corporate world way we exchange money for services and sustenance.
Here's a song and video to help illustrate my point:
[ame]
Vito you are on drugs.... Art is no different than code or music, it's as simple as that, especially if the person using it is making money off it.
Yes. You, personally, probably get paid to exert effort on behalf of a larger organization, but when you stop working for the company, they stop paying you. You don't continue to get paid because you did some work a long time ago.
Why is your personal work different? Since you don't expressly need to sell it (you have a job, after all), why aren't you giving it away left and right? Why must you keep it all to yourself? Isn't that selfish? How is this not greedy behavior?
plus artist get paid well worth their skills, we practically get money poured on us from golden goblets.
Freelancers work for money. Almost always work for hire. They don't get royalties or licensing fees or anything once the work is done.
If they want more money, they have to do more work.
This is good and healthy.
What I'm asking is, why should rasmus be considering taking compensation for a model he has already made? If he's not doing any additional work, why should he be thinking about taking money for not doing anything, and why isn't that wrong?
what if everything made for dom war and unearthly was available for free > sweet, my company doesn't have to hire a bunch of people to make art for our game we'll just use all this stuff available for free.
Where does that world view fit in with yours vito?
and you don't see anything wrong with a company asking a freelancer if they can use his work for free? This is assuming they did of coarse, for all we know they said "we'd like to use one of your pieces just let us know how much you want for it" and we're all arguing like jackasses over nothing.
I dunno, I kind of find it odd that digital work is suddenly without value.
cg artists let the royalty horse leave the stable long ago, so I doubt you can get that. It would be nice to get royalties
Generally:
they want something, you make it, they pay you
I just see this as a different order:
you make something, they want it, they pay you (if you want to in this instance)
I don't realy see how someone can be said to be selfish for not giving away their work for free (which they put a lot of effort into), when it's being suggested another person should be able take that work for free and make money from it, when they haven't exerted the effort in making the thing.
A lot of inventors work this way. Do you think that edison should've sold lightbulbs for free? Look around you. How many things in your building do you think someone is making royalties money off?
If this was the case pharmaceutical companies wouldn't try to develop cures because they couldn't sell them afterwards to recoup the cost of research. Someone has to pay the bills for people who do this stuff.
do you like dying vito?
There's also the issue of confusing 'object value' with 'license value'.
An object, if sold, has just one value (lets ignore resale and second hand for now), it's intrinsic value. A licensed object can be sold many times because it's the license that's valuable and that can be sold as many times as there are people willing to buy them.
Who's to say that retrospectively licensing something isn't an inherent part of the total intrinsic value of the object; the time and effort that went into it's production isn't mutually inclusive (or exclusive) of that value so has nothing to do with overall remuneration, historical or not.
Your wider argument is one of distribution not of age, the only difference between the two positions is whether one gets paid for that or not, you distribute your work for free (?), others choose to be paid for said same distribution.
One could also argue that because someone was willing to pay you for old work that in of itself means the work still has value, regardless how old it is, virtual goods don't age, tarnish or rot.
By the way, does your free work come with a terms of use? Even if that's Turbo Squids? Do you distribute under Creative Commons or GPL? Or what about "a little mention is fine", all of those are 'costs', they're just not ones based on bank notes.
So all those that argue for copyleft and copyFree distribution are actually missing the point about things being 'free', they're not, in order for that to happen, the work would literally be 'invisible' and 'unknown' - no authorship, no claim, everyone can use as they see fit, for any purpose etc, without that actually being said (because that's then a 'license') and of course that then falls into the murky warters (misspelling is deliberate) of orphan works....
Thanks everyone, I appreciate your thoughts. I think it boils down to this:
Case A: Selling everything, including rights, in which case charging for the time spent would be natural.
Case B: Giving them display rights etc for a nominal fee, while retaining rights, and continuing to build a relationship that generates more work.
I'm going for B
greedy bastard!
Once upon a time, we reproduced books using scribes. The job was fairly prestigious. Then someone made a printing press. The last people to realize that the job of a scribe was obsolete, were the scribes.
A similar thing is happening today with digital media. We no longer need the RIAA to burn CDs for us. The whole industry is flipped upside down and the RIAA is using every legal trick they can to remain, somehow, legit. The truth is, because of the Internet, the RIAA is irrelevant. A few really visionary artists, such as NiN, fully understand this.
You've built your lives and careers around assumptions of intellectual property rights laws that are horribly broken and about as far from the intent of the creators of those laws as they could possibly be. You feel a sense of entitlement to the way that those laws work, you feel that the rules were promised to you and that you are entitled to the gains provided by them. If you could make enough money off of an hours worth of work to retire for the rest of your life, you wouldn't hesistate to welcome the opportunity. That is, after all, the way of our culture. Greed.
Intellecual property rights are defined in arbitrary ways. I can't use your 30 second jingle in my commerical because you "own' it, yet you CAN use the English language to write these posts because no one has succesfully filed rights to English.
The whole concept that any one of you can "own" intellectual property is about as insane as paper having monitary value. It only works when everyone "plays along" and if you can step outside of the system for even a moment, it's obvious how superficial and worthless it all really is.
But it's the system we have and it's the system we're going to have to work with. Unfortuantely for those of you building your careers around these laws, your time is running out. You might make it to the end of your lifetime without a significant enough change to scare you, but then again, you might not.
Open Source, Creative Commons, Free Culture... there are lots of growing movements that change the way things are working and, chances are, these movements are not going to lose momentum anytime soon.
The fact that you willingly accept IP laws is the reason so many of our systems are in complete control by huge organisations with one purpose - profit.
IP law slams the brakes on innovation. The android phone was void of multi-touch functionality for one reason - fear of Apple's patents. Multi-touch is a good user interface that can be greatly improved on and can enhance many of the devices we use today. Google had this functionality fully working, and turned it off because of IP law.
If you look at our technology as a cultural whole, know that greed is preventing us from being 10, 20, or 100 years more advanced than where we are now.
Think that these IP laws promote innovation? Read some history.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080311/190606504.shtml
IP laws were first introduced to provide a very limited *short term* monopoly on technology to spur innovation. Congressional abuse has extended the concept of copyright such that great grandchildren of inventors are still profiting from works they had absolutely nothing to do with.
Vito is simply asking you to step outside of this greedy box, forget about your lust for money, and think about the value of how you spend your time and what kind of contribution you actually want to be part of with the handful of decades we each get to live.
Maybe you disagree, but if you can't see his point at all - you're just another brainwashed sheep.
Is IP currently going through an upheaval? Yes.
Are copyright and patent laws in need of reform? Yeah, probably.
Do corporate interests have too much influence and control via their lobbying efforts? Yep.
But just because there are some problems with IP laws doesn't mean we need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. In its ideal state, IP regulation has the potential to encourage innovation and protect the rights of creators. Just because these rights have probably been extended too far (and too long) doesn't mean that the solution is just to abolish IP altogether and make everything free.
I'm pretty sure there are more options than the two you present ("either we have IP laws and corporations control everything and everyone is selfish" and "don't accept IP laws, everything should be free, stop being greedy"). And I'm pretty sure that rasmus's situation falls into that middle ground. To paint his situation as equivalent to a multi-national corporation registering extremely broad patents in hopes of stifling innovation while collecting large sums of money for doing nothing... well, that seems pretty far-fetched to me.
I love sharing, and I love freedom of information, but the world doesn't operate on goodwill -- and wishing it were so isn't going to make it happen. Just because some of us happen to believe that IP laws have some benefits doesn't mean we don't recognize the drawbacks. And it doesn't mean we're unwashed sheep, or that we're immediately selfish bastards. Some of us just want to be paid for our work, for our creativity, and for countless hours, days, and years of effort. And I'm pretty sure that all of us need a place to live and food to eat.
The simple fact is Rasmus has a product that a company would like to purchase.
Also, Android is like an OS. Not just one phone. It will be supported by multiple phones and some of them will probably have touch.
l
l
l
TLDR
Rasmus, sorry your thread devolved into a anarcho-capitalist shit-fest. You have nothing to feel bad about for being compensated for work done, whether that work was done with the intention of being sold or just for the love of creating. Artists, inventors, and entrepreneurs do this all the time.
You did the work. You set the price.
On topic, something for you to consider Rasmus is the replaceability of the asset. How easy would it be for them to get something similar from a different source? Since they contacted you instead of vice versa, you have the bargaining advantage, but that doesn't mean they haven't also contacted several other art sources in the interest of comparison. If you keep your price competitive given that you won't be handing over actual ownership of the asset, then you might get to have your cake and eat it too.
ZackF: Thanks, that was the first actually useful post in quite a while
Should I work for free?
Also, on a side note, I'm thinking about becoming an astronaut, do any of you Yanks have sisters that I can marry to gain citezenship? K thx bye.
No, but seriously, you are selling something that you have made. You spend TIME and EFFORT in making it. Someone else wants to use it. They should pay for your TIME and EFFORT.
The best way to do this is to talk with someone from the company as to what their budget is/willingness to spend. Then jack the price up 10%