You have to remember that Jason Hardy raked AH over the coals concerning the Packs that he released into the wild, so AH being a little miffed about that, I dont see a problem. Plus I believe AH actually asked multiple times from the Catalyst management about it not getting into the book, and he was told it wouldnt get printed.

Note that the question of who owns the copyright, and when, depends upon exactly how the contract is worded.
I have no desire to see, or debate, what Catalyst did write in their contracts. It does sound extremely likely that future freelancers should be aware that Topps people have taught CGL to make sure that their contracts make the writing a work for hire.
(To get an idea of the range, remember that a book contract with a traditional book publisher does NOT make the book a work for hire.)

Yours,
Joel M. Halpern

Contracts for Shadowrun work have been work for hire since at least 1999 and certainly before that, at FASA, FanPro, and Catalyst, Joel.

i'm not entirely certain at that point if AH had even received a contract for that work.

No it's not a red herring it's clear evidence of Topps' attitude towards copyright and the authors that it works with.

To be clear. He tendered a submission without contract which was then 'accidentally' published on-line. At Wizkid's request he updated it and it continued to be published on-line with attribution as canon without transfer of copyright for over three years. He licensed the work to them on the condition that it was rolled into canon, as a seamless part of the universe per the original FASA submission guidelines, and that he received attribution.

When they reneged on that he sued Topps. Without transfer of copyright the previous publication had created a joint work that he was an equal co-author of.

The question of magnitude does not impact the validity of his claim.

I'm not really here to question the validity of his claim anyway. I'm pointing out what Topps response to that claim demonstrates about Topps and how that attitude appears to have rubbed off on CGL.





How does that amount to not being powerless?

If we owe you $500 your only recourse is to take us to court?

Up until now I had, to some extent, held my tongue with regards CGL because I enjoyed working on the few things I helped playtest and if everything worked out and CGL were exonerated I didn't want to have burned any bridges.

After listening to Randall, I wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire.

Hyperbole. Do you think that cease and desist letters are magically self executing? Copyrights and contracts are both enforced by the courts. There are significant differences between the two actions, but it's not as if a copyright claim somehow avoids litigation. By your logic, the freelancers were, are, and always will be completely powerless. I respectfully disagree.

If your concern is that a $500 contract breach is too small to actually pursue, that's probably wrong. Impossible to say without seeing the contracts and knowing where people live, but that sort of thing could conceivably be pursued in a state small claims court, and small claims processes are meant to be streamlined and inexpensive.

I'm going to step back out at this point, as I don't want to get sucked into another Fuchs-eqsue exchange.

I had a contract for PACKS. I had a contract for almost everything, eventually.

Good, because the court ruled on that already, in favor of Topps.

And your point is?

So, I have a question about those specific locations out of 6th World Almanac that you had submitted the drafts for, that had not previously been mentioned in any SR product, but showed up in the PDF release even after you were no longer working with them. Since their policy is now "There was a contract, so it's a work for hire and the copyright has always been ours" they won't have any reservations about including that work in the print version either. Now this is a bit of a simplification, but essentially, your contract says that payment is due to you a certain number of days after the street date of the physical book that your work appears in, doesn't it?

No. While it blatantly obvious that Jason (I presume it was Jason) stripped my drafts down to outlines and handed them to at least one of the new authors with instructions to use those places, they did not (unlike in Corp Guide) use any of my own actual writing. There was a theft of ideas, but not actual material. It was doubleplusungood, at least to me, but not plagiarism.

Which raises and interesting question. If work for hire means that TOPPS owns the copyright of the completed work, what does it say about the ideas before they become completed work?

It says "don't tell them to Randall." You can't copyright an idea, only keep it to yourself.

That the validity of Malcomson's claims is established. They are invalid.

I firmly believe that at least some showrunners and authors troll the online forums for their TV shows/book series and use the "fan speculation" to drive the direction of the story. "Oh, hey, that's even better than what I had planned! Yoink! Mine!"

Thanks Adam. Given that clarity, I apologize for what may have looked like an attempt to muddy the already roiled waters.
Joel

If CGL had consulted Topps' lawyers, I'm guessing they would have told CGL to publish the book with the content he wrote and send him a check as per the contract. That's part of the intent behind the work for hire clause, so that one party can't take another up to the very end of a project then refuse to release the work. Of course the other major part is to create a cut and dry situation of who owns the copyright to what.

Sorry, but this isn't ideal. Small claims court works great if both parties are in the same state, but in this type of freelance work, that's often not the case. Filing an out-of-state small claims suit is much more difficult and often requires you to file in the state where the defendant is and appear in court in that state.

This is a difficult situation for the freelancers. Which is why I consider it extremely important to work with people you trust. Unfortunately, no one I trust and have worked with extensively is currently at Catalyst. And with RNB's recent statement, I can't see any good reason to write for CGL. It puts me--as a freelancer--at too much of a risk. Others can make their own choices, but I advise them to read their CGL contracts very carefully and understand what they are signing before they sign them. You can negotiate the language in a contract before you sign it, especially if you're a freelancer that has a lot of work history (even better if that work history is with CGL).

And please, be very careful about the termination language and the payment conditions. The termination language in the CGL contracts I remember allowed either party to terminate the contract with 15 days prior written request. Nothing wrong with that (in fact, it's good), but be careful if they are still paying freelancers after publication. If the book publishes and you don't get paid, terminating the contract at that point is of far less value.

And what becomes of these work for hire copyrights if the contract is terminated early? Could CGL take the draft of PACKS that they have, for instance, and drop it into Runner's Toolkit with only minor editorial cleanup, and not the full from-the-ground-up re-write that we were expecting earlier? Because I have a feeling that's why Randall's making these statements now, to lay the groundwork for that sort of surprise later on.

I kind of doubt it, if only because I've been obliquely informed that they're going ahead with a new and different take on PACKS (although why they kept the acronym in this specific instance is bizarre to me.) In the case of another product, I was co-writing some rules with Mark Dynna and made it clear upon termination that any drafts or portions of drafts I'd submitted should be considered Mark's work alone, just to be fair to him. There are a few other items - ones I have not released yet, because I want to see what the outcome of the August 9 hearing is - but with the terminations of my contracts they'd be opening themselves up to a lawsuit to use them, whether Randall thinks he has the copyrights or not.

PACKS is being rewritten from the ground up.

Jason H.

Latest PACER updates:
- The proceeding has been transferred from Judge Glover to Judge Overstreet
- The parties are jointly requesting that the currently-scheduled August 9 hearing be moved to October 12, 2010.

These are actually old (16th), but I've not been checking frequently since things have really died down in advance of the hearing. Both parties support the continuance because their attorneys have trial conflicts around the August 9 date, because the "the bulk of the parties [will be] out of the country around that time," and because the new judge doesn't usually hold trials on Mondays.

Well Crime Time is a band listed in Seattle 2072, that at leased to my knowledge never had a cannon reference but I believe Steve Kenson or someone posted asking for band names on Dumpshock and I gave the story of Crime Time and the adventures surrounding the band. So in my book no harm no foul even if it was intentional as I posted about Crime Time all over Dumpshock and all they used was the name anyways so for all I know its someone else Crime Time band and not my ork rapper.

Can I ask a dumb question? I don't know anything about the business of RPG or freelance writing. What kind of payscale are freelancers getting? I imagine that it varies widely, depending upon the quality and breadth of the material (e.g., a chapter pays less than an entire book).

Long before Seattle 2072, CrimeTime first appeared in State of the Art: 2063, number three in the top ten albums of 2062. AFAIK, Steve Kenson wasn't involved in the SOTA63.

Pay for writers is typically per-word. A typical pay rate in RPGs is 3 cents a word; up to 5 for larger companies and established authors. (Much higher than that if you are writing for Wizards of the Coast ... which is still low when compared to technical writers, for example.)

Whats a typical chapter word count?

On the extreme low-end of the scale - by which I generally mean new indie publishers - the rate can be 1 cent per word. At the high end of the scale, with publications like Dragon Magazine, you're looking at 6 cents per word. Industry average, if there is such a thing, is I think 3 cents a word. FanPro and CGL were paying 3-4.5 cents a word while I was there, as far as I know - I got 3.5 for most of my run. Artist freelancer rates are, of course, completely different and based on the size of a piece (quarter page, half page, third-of-a-page, full-page, cover, all that jazz) and I know very little about their rates.

On top of that, freelancers get 1-3 "comp" copies of the book they work on, whenever the company decides to send it.

That sounds like peanuts, and well it is: Lovecraft was getting pretty similar rates from Weird Tales in the 20s. The paltry rate is one of the reasons why not paying your freelancers is a shitty thing to do, but it also determines things like how much money you're going to budget for the development of e-books: the amount of $$$ you're willing to pony up is based on your expected break-even point, and that $$$ determines how many pages and art you're going to try and squeeze in at a given pricepoint. I got to see a spreadsheet once for that sort of thing - I think it was Digital Grimoire, which the writers were doing pro bono anyway - and the break-even was expected to be 50 copies, which is what a web-only product is expected to sell on average (DG did much better than that, so I hear.)

Paid by the word? How Dickensian! Are the editors then paid by how many words they can cut out?

Bugger, Adam sniped me.


It depends. Generally an RPG book is around 100k-150k, the smallest single sections are generally 3k-5k, while big chapters (Seattle in Runner Havens, Neo-Tokyo in Corporate Enclaves, Chicago in Feral Cities, etc.) can be 50k-60k easy.

That's a useless metric, since chapter sizes are so different.

A full page of text in a black-and-white Shadowrun supplement (such as Vice, Corp Guide, etc) contains roughly 1100 words.

A full page of text in SR4A contains roughly 1250 words.

How else would you measure their work?
Per Letter? Per Sentence?
Also, they get told about what length they need to write for a certain part, as far as i understood.

I would have thought that it would be on a per-piece basis -- e.g., $X per chapter. I definitely don't pretend that I know of a better alternative to being paid by the word! In my line of work, I get paid by the hour, regardless of the length of the resulting written work.

Here's why paying by word count happens: If you know your word count, and you know how many words-per-page you are going to have, you can estimate the length of the book and the amount of work that it will take to finish it beyond writing (editing time, layout, art, color correction if photographs are included, proofing, etc.); as well as estimating the print costs.

If an extra 30,000 words are written, the publisher not only has to spend more money for those words, but they also need more art, more production time, more printing expenses, more shipping/storage expenses, etc. It all flows downhill from the word count.

I can't speak for the RPG industry, but for the publishing industry in general, a short story typically runs 5000-15000 words. Anything over 25,000 words is considered a novella and anything over 50,000 is considered a novel. Most series romance, westerns, pulp mysteries, etc. are in the 50,000 to 70,000 word range. Most best seller runs 65,000 to 90,000, and most fantasy tends to get over 100,000. Anything under novella-length (short stories) will be paid per word, with rates ranging from $.005 to $.05/word. Novellas typically are only published by established authors, usually as a group of novellas (the seasons books by Steven King, for example) or to fill out an anthology of previously-published short stories (Jim Butcher's forthcoming Side Jobs will have a new novella published with his previous short stories). Novels are typically paid an advance against sales. For example, you get $5,000 and we'll print 10,000 copies of the book. For every copy we sell, we'll pay you $1. If you sell 5000 copies of the book, you get nothing more. If you sell more, we pay you the balance quarterly. If you sell less, you get to return some of that money back to us (unless your contract says otherwise).

This applies only to fiction writing. I don't have much knowledge about non-fiction writing, so I can't say for sure about that. And RPG writing tends to run halfway between the two in terms of writing, but seems to run closer to non-fiction in how it's handled in the industry.

Edit: Oh, and the standard shorthand is 250 words per page, if you want an idea.
Edit2: Fixed the drunken math

That math seems off a bit.

If you want to see what a real fiction writers contract says look at this:
CMAP #3: What Authors sell to Publishers By Charlie Stross

Oh blah...I had a crappy day at work so I downed a glass of vodka.

To be super-nitpicky, I think "if you sell 5000 or fewer" is most accurate?

Mmmm, vodka....

Missions (and most of the PDF projects) are a flat rate. A LOW flat rate. Sadly. But that's also determined in part by sales, so... If I can convince the powers that be to figure out ways advertise, and if we can make Missions and PDFs worthwhile for the average Shadowrun player/GM to purchase, then the pay rate will (hopefully) rise.

Bull

Not just vodka, but homemade vanilla-infused vodka.

Back to topic, if you're interested in the publishing industry, go to your local library and check out the Writer's Market guide. Lots of good, practical information for how the publishing industry works.

Since this discussion (the industry, how you get into it, what the pay is, etc.) seems to come up all the time, I made a topic for it over here:

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=32142

I don't THINK it exists elsewhere (sorry to the mods if I double up), but it seems like a cool thing to talk about.

Does that mean that you want to get the offtopic-stuff into a seperate thread?

This is madness!

Madness? THIS. IS. DUMPSHOCK!

...I'm sorry, but you set me up.

Judge Overstreet? I love his comics price guide!





Yeah, I've got nothing.

Good, we can get back to talking about vanilla vodka, best of all the vodkas. Mix that with some coke and I'm gone...

That sounds good, but is it better to get plain vodka and vanilla coke?

Mesh

Regular Pepsi is best.