Contracts & Copyright

Last week we had a brief look at income and the different ways a creative individual can get into a paid position. This week it was all about the rights an individual has to creative property, what a contract is and why we use them. It was interesting to find that copyright is a ‘bundle of rights’ that a person has to protect themselves from others who wish to profit from their work without permission.

Copyright is hard to define in a single sentence due to its complexity and this often creates legal issues. For example, ABC News wrote a story on how a woman was almost sued because a copyright protected a song that was playing in the background of a video of her son dancing. The link here: http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/home-video-prince/story?id=3777651
These issues don’t just stop there. Copyright doesn’t protect ideas only some form of embodiment. Also, there are rights to fair use which allows some special uses of copyrighted material such as criticism or teaching. (Oxford Dictionary, 2016)

Essentially a copyright allows the author of a work the exclusive rights to use the work in a number of ways including publish the work, control copying as well as its distribution. Copyright is there, upon creation of a work to protect the creative rights of an individual.

Copyright is really a set of rights — copyright owners have economic and moral rights as well as legal rights.

Copyright law aims to protect the creative work of the copyright owner from unauthorised use by others.

Copyright law also tries to balance this right with the general public’s right to access information.

(University of Sydney, 2002)

We can look at the above points to see how copyright conflicted with both of the above parties. The musician had the right to stop their work from being published without permission and the mother was using it as ‘fair use’. Copyrights are important to each of us because they protect the work we do, I definitely do not want someone claim my work as theirs and making money off of it whilst I do the work.

Contracts

How, you may ask, does one obtain other people’s work as materials for their own work? How does a game developer get the rights to an animator’s work to create their game? The answer often comes in the form of a contract.

A contract is an agreement between two parties that is enforceable by law. Usually, a contract is made so that both parties rights are protected whilst being able to get what they want. Sometimes there are hidden clauses that people miss or don’t understand and that’s why it’s important to ensure you do read and fully understand before agreeing and signing one.

To reiterate this idea we got in pairs and attempted to write a contract. The idea was to make it sound so that there was no misunderstandings, catches or unknown clauses. I am not a lawyer so this was a challenging task, fortunately, there is a resource we had access to. It is called Contract(). Contract() allows the user to put it the details of a contract such as the parties names and tasks that need to be completed to create a reasonably sound contract.

It came out looking something like this:

Kyle’s Co. needs to approve the work resulting from the services before it is considered complete, and Kyle’s Co. will approve or disapprove the work as soon as possible. Yaqoob is aware that minor adjustments and fixes to the work are also part of the services. The deadline for Yaqoob to complete the services is September 2019. Yaqoob is aware that he must adhere to the requirements of fortnightly updates and this is also recognised as minor deadlines.

When Yaqoob becomes aware that Yaqoob is unable to complete the services on the deadlines, Yaqoob will immediately notify Kyle’s Co. Together, Kyle’s Co. and Yaqoob can agree to set a new deadline or redefine the services to be performed for an existing deadline. If Yaqoob is unable to complete the services on the deadline and Kyle’s Co. and Yaqoob cannot agree on a new deadline, Kyle’s Co. can decide to no longer use Yaqoob’s services and terminate the contract without any further payments.

If Kyle’s Co. does not pay on time, Yaqoob can delay deadlines with as many days as Kyle’s Co. delays the owed payment. If Kyle’s Co. wants Yaqoob to perform services that are not listed above, Kyle’s Co. and Yaqoob can agree to add services to this agreement or sign a new agreement.

Of course, this resource is no lawyer and has no degree so it’s always recommended that you use one to create an affirmative contract. Just to avoid any disputes.

On the topic of disputes, it also became important to create a reasonable way in our contract to exit or disband it, in the case of disagreements on pay, work or any other important manner. I think this becomes an important issue as nobody wants to be bound legally to something they don’t want to do.

It is important for one to understand their legal obligations when pertaining to money and intellectual property. A person needs to know if they have infringed copyright, have had their rights infringed upon or otherwise done anything wrong. Legally or morally. Sure, it might be hard to ascertain entirely what these are, I know to myself there is a lot I must learn, I do acknowledge. Alas I now know, understanding my rights and being able to understand what they are in certain situations, such as under contract is just as important.

All this to make sure that I can create something, like a game perhaps? and legally have the rights to own it.

-Kyle