When you ask a freelance graphic designer or content writer to create a project for your business, you don’t always get all the rights to that project. As a matter of fact, unless you specifically outline something else in your contract with a freelancer, you typically have the right to use the results of their work for you, but the ownership of that actual content still rests with a freelancer.
This isn’t necessarily the problem it seems like it might be: it’s very rare that a freelancer would reuse work created for another client due to the fact that it would be bad for that freelancer’s business. But it is something to consider when discussing the contract, especially when you have the alternative of asking the freelancer to complete your project as a work for hire.
What is a work for hire?
With a work for hire, you own all rights to the design, content or other project that you’ve asked a freelancer to create. It’s up to you whether that work can be licensed to someone else down the road and whether you can create derivative works from it. Essentially, you hold the copyright on the project. The trade-off is that many freelancers will ask for a higher rate to create a work for hire because it does mean that any income they could have earned from reworking the project down the road will be entirely unavailable.
That higher price can be worthwhile. If, for instance, you ask a freelance writer to create a series of posts for your company’s blog, under a work for hire agreement, you can turn around and compile those posts into an ebook after they’ve run on your blog. Otherwise, though, you have to get permission from the writer and may have to pay an additional fee. If such future use is less of a concern, however, it may be worthwhile to save some money and not worry about getting a work for hire.
How do you ask for a work for hire?
When ironing out the details of the contract you sign with any freelancer you work with, you’ll need to mention the fact that you expect a work for hire, as well as add a clause to the contract. Copyright law assumes that if ownership of a particular work isn’t laid out in a contract, it automatically belongs to the individual that created that work.
Not all freelancers are comfortable offering the option of a work for hire and you may have to discuss the subject in some depth. By being willing to pay a premium for a work for hire, though, you can reduce the negotiations significantly.
Once you are in agreement about the use of a work for hire, it’s also useful to discuss the format the project will be provided to you in. In many cases, freelancers provide a finished project made for a particular use. But it can be worthwhile to get copies of the working files — for instance, if you’ve got a new logo that’s been formatted for use on a website, having the full file can make it easier to use the same logo for print jobs.
Image by Flickr user stuartpilbrow
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Tags: contract, intellectual property, work for hire
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