This last week I’ve been talking to a freelance web developer who works with us here in ScreenWorks. He’s just finishing up a project, and I thought we could get him to help out with some of the endless website stuff that always needs doing around here. He was pretty keen to get involved (We’re making games! And we’re awesome! Can you blame him?), so I came up with a project that needed doing and we sat down to write up a quick contract.

As we were talking things over, I realised the standard terms on work-for-hire contracts, especially for web designers, are frustratingly unfair. The employer almost always ends up owning exclusive rights to the final product, often to the extent that the contractor can’t even legally include it in their portfolio. I’ve had this happen to me more than once, back in my own freelance days - but this is the first time I’ve been on the other side of the table, imposing (by default) unfair and unenforceable constraints on innocent creative types.

Screw that. We’re going to do things a little differently.

So I sat down with the rest of Blazing Griffin to figure out how to do this right. What we want to do is make sure our contractors are getting a fair deal, and that anyone who does a piece of work for us gets to keep a measure of ownership of their own work. I mean, come on - you played BioShock, right? Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? But then, where do you draw the line? Some examples:

• If a 3D modeller creates an item or weapon for The Ship, can he use also use it in a demo reel? In a personal game project? In a game for another company? 
• If a web developer builds us a cool piece of tech for the website or the forums, can she link to it in her portfolio? Re-use it on her personal site? Launch it as a standalone webapp? Licence it to a third party?
• If a coder develops a portable piece of middleware for us, can she licence it to other companies? To our competitors? Use it in her own games?

I think it’s obvious that a contractor should be allowed to do some of these things; it’s pretty clear that some of them aren’t exactly in our best interests, either. It turns out that line is tough to determine, especially when standard procedure out there is to answer every one of those questions with a firm and unrelenting “no.”

In our back-and-forth we came up with a couple ideas, until we hit upon Valve’s Steam Workshop Licence Agreement. At first glance it looks like a pretty standard contract, except it’s in reverse: accepting the Steam Workshop agreement means you grant Valve permission to use your content. We’d like to structure our contracts similarly, so that we get what we need out of the deal (assets, code, whatever) while the creators keep some of the rights to their own work. We may have paid for it, but at the end of the day it’s still their sweat.

It’s a tough question and we’re still not sure what the answer is, so if you have any insight or suggestions (or if you’re a freelance web developer looking for work!), give us a shout!