Don’t Use This Agreement in California
Don’t use this agreement if the IC is located in California, because it may cause the worker to be considered your employee for workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance and disability insurance purposes. (See Intellectual Property Ownership for more about this issue.) Instead, use a standard IC agreement including a clause assigning the IC’s intellectual property rights to you.
You can use this agreement only when you hire an IC to create or contribute to a work of authorship that falls within one of the following categories:
- a contribution to a collective work—a work created by more than one author, such as a newspaper, magazine, anthology or encyclopedia
- a part of an audiovisual work—for example, a motion picture screenplay
- a translation
- supplementary works such as forewords, afterwords, supplemental pictorial illustrations, maps, charts, editorial notes, bibliographies, appendixes and indexes
- a compilation—for example, an electronic database
- an instructional text
- a test
- answer material for a test, or
- an atlas.
Do not use this agreement for any work that does not fall within one of these categories. (See Intellectual Property Ownership.)
When an IC signs this agreement, he or she gives up all copyright rights in the work he or she creates. Moreover, you are considered the author of the work for copyright purposes. (See Intellectual Property Ownership.)
You need to describe in the agreement or on a separate attachment the work the IC will create.
The agreement also provides that the work will be a work made for hire. This means that you, the Client, will be considered the work’s author for copyright purposes and own all the copyright rights in the work. However, if for some reason the work fails to qualify as a work made for hire, this agreement contains an assignment from the IC to you of all copyright rights in the work. This will mean you will still own all the copyright rights in the work.
However, in this event, the work won’t be a work made for hire and you won’t be considered the author. The only practical result of this is that the IC can revoke the assignment 35 years after it’s made. There’s nothing you can do to prevent this, but in most cases it’s meaningless because few works have a useful economic life of more than 35 years.