Selling Your Creative Works
Visual artists should check out this website, which discusses contracts dealing with - of course - visual arts. The author is a visual artist (check out the very cool rendition of the copyright symbol on the homepage) and has taken it upon him or her self to help educate fellow artists on this very important subject. You may love your art, but you have to make a living, which means you have to get paid, which means you have to sell smart, which means you have to have a good contract. I think this website is a beautiful example of the good side of the web - peer to peer information sharing at its best.
If you are a creator, the first step to selling your work is to make sure you know what you are selling. Selling a work protected by copyright is vastly different than selling a bottle of shampoo. When you sell a bottle of shampoo, the buyer can do anything they want with it. You may assume they will wash their hair with it, but if they wash their dog or their car with it instead, you really have no right to complain. Even if they take the bottle of shampoo and use it in some new jello/mud/shampoo wrestling venture, the seller of the shampoo has no legal right to intervene.
The sellers of a photograph or article, however, do sell their works for specific uses. If the buyer tries to use the work for a different use, the seller can intervene and either stop the use or be paid money for the additional use. Creator/sellers must have a good contract in place that specifies the rights/uses being sold.
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