by Mona Adele

Created on: February 21, 2009

Copyright law presents a simple premise: that creators, artists, and authors should be rewarded economically for contributing to the marketplace of ideas. The system in place protecting copyright gives authors the exclusive ability to transfer and negotiate their copyrights through assignment, transfer, and licensing. Not all rights are treated equally, however, and it is important to understand exactly what you're transferring away when you sign the dotted line.

Having a Right to Sell

Before you can think about selling your work, you need to know that you are the owner. If multiple people contribute to a work (e.g., collaboration project for software creation), each contributor is a joint author and owns the work much in the same way that a tenant in common in real property owns land: each joint author has an undivided possessory interest in the whole work. This means that without a contract stating the contrary, everyone who contributes to the project is a joint owner subject to the interests of the other authors.

This can be problematic. For example, if you want to sell your product to a publisher, you will probably be required to sign a contract that assigns all rights to distribution to the publisher. You can't do this if you are a joint author unless you have permission from the other joint authors. There are limitations to this rule. For instance, a joint author can license certain non-exclusive rights independently so long as that joint author shares the profits with the other joint authors.

Joint authorship is something to keep in mind if anyone could potentially claim a stake in your work. Unfortunately, the law concerning joint authorship is a bit ambiguous and jurisdiction dependent-the only real bright line rule is that the contribution must be more than "de minimus" or more than a minimal amount.

If you work for a corporation or on behalf of an organization your work may be a work-for-hire. This means that the author (you) does not own the work under Copyright law. Instead, the company employing you automatically owns the rights to anything you create within the scope of your employment. Because the limitations on work-for-hire are also fairly ambiguous (for instance, if you work on a personal project after hours on a company computer, the project may still belong to the corporation), it is important to make the limitations clear in your employment contract.

Selling your Work

There are various ways to profit from your work, including exclusive licensing,

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