PING: Lawyers/Business Folk

[albionmoonlight]

My buddy just sent me this email. As a public defender, I don't really have an answer for him. But it strikes me as something that people here may have dealt with:

This may not be enough information for you to give me a meaningful answer, but lets say that I am starting a website that sells games and mp3s. I am going to be working with programmers and musicians who will be paid for their services (i.e creating games, creating songs). I will want the programmers and musicians to sign documents giving me sole ownership of their creations. I will also need some boilerplate licence/usage agreement for people who buy the songs and games from my website. Do you know how much something like that would cost?

[Izulde]

Sole ownership of their creations? Good luck with that.

[Logan]

You should ask for clarification: does it want to know how much it will cost for the boilerplate agreement, or how much it will cost to defend in court the first time one of his "better than expected selling" programmers sues him?

[britrock88]

The first thing that pops into my mind is that this guy should for a corporate shell, so that it can take ownership of the creations of the programmers and musicians, who should be contracted to the business in such a way as to be considered its agents.

[molson]

As a public defender, I don't really have an answer for him.

Don't you love how your friends and relatives all think every lawyer has every answer for any law or business related question?

[JPhillips]

Sole ownership of their creations? Good luck with that.

Yeah I can't see that working. There are enough other distribution avenues that a creator doesn't need to sign away all rights.

[Mustang]

From what I understand, you pretty much have to have it copyrighted or patented in order to buy it and then you are buying the rights to that copyright or patent. You aren't going to want to buy something that the person stole from someone else nor is it possible to buy something that in theory doesn't exist. Copyrights are pretty cheap, I want to say in the $100 range (I even think you can bundle up things as 'the works of' where patents are more expensive.

Generally though, sounds like he wants to have a game company or music company where he buys intellectual property and then sells it. It won't be that easy and sounds like he is taking a page out of the underwear gnomes playbook

Step 1 - Buy songs
Step 2 -
Step 3 - Profit