Tag: Ownership

Posted on

“Sometimes People Say Yes”

Putting this here for myself and later thoughts, as much as anything, but here’s David Brothers writing about freelancing and not owning your work:

But, and I say this with no animosity or judgment whatsoever, I do realize that the pay wasn’t great and signing over my rights wasn’t wise. I became aware of it a couple years back, and if I was writing something that was too personal or important to me, I kept it for 4thletter! instead of donating it to AOL. I didn’t hold back on my AOL work, but the things I loved beyond belief or wanted to keep control of, like my Black History posts or the various Frank Miller explorations, I kept to myself.

I was surprised when I went to a mainstream outlet, The Atlantic, and they said their going rate was $100 per piece, plus you retain your rights after a certain amount of time has passed. I was paid well at CA, well enough to be happy with what I was doing. I’ve written for a few other non-comics outlets recently and been paid on a similar scale.

I don’t think I was not-smart when I first started getting paid to write about comics, but I am definitely smarter now. I didn’t have the experience then that I do now, but there still aren’t many — any? — resources for new writers-about-comics to check out to see what their peers in other fields are being paid. There’s also the rookie conundrum. Can I get away with asking to change a contract or will that sour the deal? Back then, my thought was “I need this job more than I need ownership.” From here on out, I know to ask the question first. Sometimes people say yes.

Posted on

On Owning It (Or Not, As The Case May Be)

I actually came across this in a different way recently — a startup, Hyperink, wanted to publish an eBook that was a collection of my previous posts. No brainer, until I realized that technically AOL now owns a majority of the things I’ve written online (after their purchase of TechCrunch in 2010). They were totally cool with me repurposing the content — kudos to them — but it’s interesting that I did have to ask. And it makes sense — they paid me to write those words.

I guess my point is that while I do actually value owning my own words, I’ve also spent the majority of my career not actually owning my own words.

– MG Siegler, from here. This is something I’ve been thinking about since my Feb-May rush of looking for work and wondering where my career was going. Almost everything I’ve written since… what, Fanboy Rampage!!! (which was a linkblog, and as such not original-content-heavy), has been the property of someone else. Certainly, the work I’m most proud of doesn’t belong to me in any legal sense. That’s depressing and worrying, but I can’t necessarily see a way past that right now; I can’t afford (financially) to take the time to write something that I do own, and I don’t have the clout to build in a rights-reversal clause into contracts with outlets that I’m working for these days. But it’s something I think about, often. Here’s Gina Trapani, from the same conversation thread:

Similar to what MG said about TechCrunch, it’s been difficult for me watching 4 years of my daily work on Lifehacker suffer from linkrot and broken images over the years. Gawker owns that content and I got paid for it, but it’s something I think about when I’m *not* getting paid to produce content.

Sometimes, I get depressed when I think about some of the things I created for io9. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot – a lot – of content I wrote for that site that was so of-the-moment or of-the-quality that I wouldn’t be too upset if it disappeared in the memory hole and was never seen again (It helps/hurts that, the more I look back on that time, the more I feel like it was bad for my development as a writer, but that’s another complaint for another day), but there were also plenty of stories/posts/essays/justplainideas that I wish that I had some ownership over. At the time, I didn’t think too much about it because (a) I had to come up with new ideas on a regular basis to hit deadlines and quotas, and (b) I had a sense of equity in the site, stupidly, because I’d been there since Day One (Since before Day One, even; I was part of the team writing for the beta version of the site before it had a name or went live), but now…? Yeah. There’s a bunch of things I wrote for io9 that I feel sad about not being able to use/recycle elsewhere.