Buying Intellectual Property

Buying Intellectual Property

There are a lot of different ways of selling or buying intellectual property, actually.

Outright Purchase

For the longest time, the only way an artist could get published was basically to forfeit any and all of their ownership rights on the work. They could either hand the entire work over to the publisher, including the rights to reproduce further copies without giving any royalties to the original creator, the rights to make a film out of the property, without paying the creator, the rights to produce sequels or continue the story, without the authors approval… and without paying the author, and even to remove the author’s name from the work. Certainly, in the early twentieth century, it was very, very commonplace for fiction magazine publishers to take the author’s name off of a work and replace it with a pseudonym. This way, they could use the pseudonym for a dozen other writers if they ever wanted to fire the original author.

If you have created some content and are looking into publishing your work, please, please, avoid this if at all possible. In some scenarios, you might not actually have another choice, but usually, you actually do. If one publisher likes your work enough to buy it, chances are that another publisher will like your work well enough to print it, but while treating you a little more fairly.

Publishing Rights

Ideally, you only want to sell a narrowly defined set of publishing rights. For example, if you sell the publishing rights for a certain amount of time, or for just one or two reprints, etcetera. Different publishers might offer different deals, but what it should come down to is this: You actually retain ownership of the work, but the publisher has the right to publish it under a certain, predetermined agreement.

If you sell publishing rights, you can usually expect a flat fee, though in some cases it may be accompanied by royalties further on down the line. In such a case, the initial fee might be lower than if you had just sold the publishing rights alone, but if the book sells well, you stand to make a lot more money in the long run.

Royalties

Sometimes when selling publishing rights, you will be given the option of collecting royalties: Say yes. Royalties would be payment issued per-sale. Maybe not per book or per CD or anything, because exact sales can be hard to track, but rather, per unit shipped, or else a percentage of overall revenue generated by your work.

Licensing

When you walk through the store and you see a bunch of Ninja Turtle action figures produced by a toy company, bear in mind that the Ninja Turtles do not actually belong to that toy company.

Right now, the Ninja Turtles belong to one of the original creators of the characters: Peter Laird. Peter Laird’s name will come up a lot in discussions regarding licensing, because, after George Lucas, he may be one of the most financially successful people who made the majority of his money through licensing.

Licensing involves allowing your intellectual property to be put to use on things like toys, t-shirts, video games, and so on. The only thing you’re selling is the license to create that merchandise, and if you’ve negotiated your contract well, you should see a percentage or royalties as well.

Some people feel that merchandising damages the integrity of the original work, but really, it’s more of a personal decision than an objective, black and white case of ethics. The integrity of an intellectual property is really defined by its owner, not by some divine, universal book of right and wrong.

But know this, licensing allows you to retain all of your ownership, and, if your stuff catches on, make some recurring income on your ideas.

If you’re really serious about making a living on your work, you really should hold out for a good deal. For a week or so, you might regret turning down an offer to sell your property, but if you do sell your property outright and it makes somebody else rich while you make barely enough to eat for a few months…

As an artist, a programmer, an author, a musician, or anything else, you should protect your work, and retain ownership. Ideally, your work should become an asset, something that you can see revenue from even twenty years from now. If you sell outright, that won’t happen.