Conversation

Work For Hire contracts are garbage and more ubiquitous than many people are aware.

That RPG tie-in novel you like? Almost certainly work for hire from a staffer or contactor - the writer gets no royalties if you buy more copies.

You may go ahead and bootleg those ebook copies of the Dragonlance Chronicles with a clear conscience, unless Hasbro's profit margins keep you up at night.

Come to mention it, RPG source books in general? Work for hire.

Tech books? Often work for hire.

Almost every magazine in the UK, Europe, and increasingly the US (ohhai, Advance Publications)? Work for hire, my friends.

Recent freelance contacts for the New York Times? I have fucking proof from multiple contributors that several of those have been work for hire, and I really need to get back to pushing a union campaign about this.

If you're not familiar with exactly what work for hire entails, the deal is that a freelance writer is commissioned, submits the work, and gets a (usually rather small) amount of money.

The publisher then owns it. Not a license to print it. The whole thing, exclusively, all moral and legal rights. The writer can't republish it, because its not theirs and gets no further money for reprints.

Some contracts indicate that they should, but in my experience it's incredibly rare that you'll ever see any money for this, even if reprints happen.

It's a piecework equivalent of the contact staff writers get (usually minus the clause about the company also owning stuff you write in your free time unless you get dispensation), only without the inconvenient obligation for the company to pay health or pension benefits to the worker, because they're an independent contractor.

In much of the world, and especially the US, this kind of contract was once far less common, but as it stands, more and more of the publishing industry is moving in that direction.

It's been a long time since jobbing writers earned decent word rates, which I think is pretty common knowledge, but work for hire contracts means that they also get no licensing and reproduction fees, no library lending fees, no legal right to reproduce work you've written for a publication that's folded, revamped its website, or been sold for asset stripping.

It's pretty common in most fields for your boss or client to own what they pay you to make for them.

But in a profession that has traditionally been provided with few benefits ostensibly because its practitioners get a long tail of intellectual property, the move towards this model is set to have a devastating impact on retiring and late-career workers.

By way of full disclosure, I'm writing some work for hire stuff for a tech book right now, but it's a contact I'm really happy with (the text goes into the Creative Commons once I've been paid for it, so it's basically CC for hire; the code is open sourced).

But most of the rest of my writing work, with only a handful of exceptions since 2010, is just under standard work for hire, and it kind of sucks.

This has been your regular reminder that copyright exists for the benefit of large companies, and not the people who actually make the stuff you enjoy.

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