Work-for-hire & employee licensing

You need to get your employer to secure the license. Do not do it yourself without a clear understanding between all three parties (your employer and the licensor and you all need to understand what the license is for and who the license is between).

You need to get your employer to secure the license. Do not do it yourself without a clear understanding between all three parties (your employer and the licensor and you all need to understand what the license is for and who the license is between).

Cheers mate. Do you know of anywhere I can research that further for reference purposes? It's very hard to search on google.

[quote name='Tom Sloper' timestamp='1322417644' post='4888156']
You need to get your employer to secure the license. Do not do it yourself without a clear understanding between all three parties (your employer and the licensor and you all need to understand what the license is for and who the license is between).

Cheers mate. Do you know of anywhere I can research that further for reference purposes? It's very hard to search on google.
[/quote]


If you need to acquire the license for the course of the job, then it should be your company's legal affair, not your own.

As he said, you need to get your employer to secure the license.


You need to tell the boss why it is necessary and they need to work out the license. Working out such a license will involve several lawyers and usually large sums of money. Unless you are the person in the company who deals with lawyers directly (which is unlikely or you wouldn't be asking) then you should probably pass it up the chain.

It is imperative that the company work out the contract, not you individually. One very important reason is that IP licenses have very strict limits. If you negotiate a license it does not necessarily follow that your employer will be able to use it. Even if you can transfer it to your company, it does not necessarily follow that the agreement will include everything the company needs. If you negotiate the license you may miss some important details; are the rights perpetual? Global? Exclusive or nonexclusive? Are rights assigned or licensed? Are they transferable? What happens to the rights if the company is acquired by another, or subdivides, or goes defunct? If any of those happens, what survives and what does not? Do they allow or limit or leave unspecified rights to derivative work, or making modifications to the work? How are moral and the oddly named "related rights" handled in the agreement? The list can go on for quite a while.

Every one of these questions can have a huge impact on the company. They can also have a huge impact on the cost of getting rights.

If you happen to miss just one of the many important details then the agreement is absolutely worthless to your employer.

If you are trying to get a license for your company, your employer and the company's lawyer absolutely need to be involved for the entire process. You should probably let your boss know and let the company execs do the work.

Judging by the OP's other thread, he's a student who's doing research for a school assignment - not actually an employee or WFH vendor looking to secure a license. (In case that information informs this discussion.)

Tom, your use of the words "school" and "homework" are hilarious.

Frob, thank you very much for taking the time. With regard to Tom's comments - this is an academic paper and as such I cannot just copy what you have said. I have to gather information, structure information and prove information. I'm very grateful that I've now got an insight into "what information to research and gather". Tom seems to think that you're writing it for me

Interesting, just read the other thread and got the context of why you would ask this question.


I'm afraid I agree with Tom on this one. If you are studying media law it should be up to you to do the research yourself. Your question made it sound like you were an actual worker who was in over your head, in which case the only good answer is to promote it up the business chain. Instead your other question makes it look like it is one question of many on a small research assignment.

Generally asking about that kind of thing online is not considered appropriate for an assignment, even for a large assignment, unless it specifically asks you to interview or survey or discuss with others.

Blindsum, I think a good research track for you would be to read the postmortems of some licensed IP games; Batman, Spiderman, etc. Gamasutra has a lot of postmortems to check out.

Blindsum, I think a good research track for you would be to read the postmortems of some licensed IP games; Batman, Spiderman, etc. Gamasutra has a lot of postmortems to check out.

Cheers for that, I am going very deep into this guys and this forum is a very small percentage of my entire research material. in fact it is no percentage of my research material because it can't be presented as research - you see? Anyway, back to my essay.