Recently, a man who wrote articles for me a few years ago emailed me and asked if he could re-use the articles that he had written for me. In this email, he pointed out that we never had an agreement about copyright.
This was annoying, as you can imagine, I hire people to write unique content so that my ‘unique’ sites will be more valuable to readers. Now this guy wants to go and distribute them willy nilly.
Of course, I hadn’t made any sort of agreement so I had to tell him, “sure, go ahead…”
Now, however, I’m a little concerned. I went to Elance and didn’t see any type of copyright terms built into the agreements - so I’m wondering - would it suffice for me to put something in the business terms? Should a create a full blown contract and have them sign it?
How do you handle copyrights?
2 responses so far ↓
Jon // Mar 31, 2008 at 12:54 am
For all of the articles, images, & scripts I have created for me I always include the sentence “All copyrights and ownership of materials created for and during this project will be transferred to me upon payment.”
I also let the person know that they can not distribute any of the material, even if they just want to use it as an example of their work.
Jennifer // Mar 31, 2008 at 9:52 pm
That sounds like an easy solution - I think I’ll go with that, too - thanks!
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