Great article, BB. What an incredibly smart and articulate and talented kid. It’s good that, as an artist, she is learning about how underhanded the creative business can be. It’s a great knowledge to have whether you are a commercial artist or fine artist in any artistic field. Good for her and she’ll do great in this field.
As for Scholastic… Shame on them for trying to pull the wool over the kid’s eyes with that B.S. FAQ page and condescending attitude not to mention their (not by accident) ToC.
There are many paths to learning. Some we choose, and others are chosen for us. It matters little which path we take, as long as we light the way for others to follow.
refresh my feeble memory- aren’t contracts made with minors non-enforceable to begin with, or did something changed that allows that now?
But yeah; I’ve seen this scam a few times; There was a company that produces manga that ran a contest looking for new talent, and used similar language in that even if you didn’t win, your ideas were forever theirs to do with as they wished.
I’m not confident about how usual it is that both parties are aware. I’ll certainly grant that when you’re employed and taking home a regular paycheck, your employer usually tends to be pretty clear that they fully own your output. In other cases, like contests and film festivals, I think it tends to happen that people accidentally sell the rights to their work. If it happened to Brad Neely, it can happen to anyone.
I don’t own Washington anymore. Spike and Mike’s Twisted Film Festival owns it. I signed a contract that I didn’t understand. And once I realized my error, I had sold the rights to the whole thing, characters and all, for two-hundred fifty dollars.
When I tried to fix the problem they would not talk to me. It’s my fault. I didn’t read what I signed. But God, nice guys, let me tell ya.
Anyway, there’s never a bad time to post the washington video, so here it is
Edit - @Shuck literally posted the same Ryan North twitter thing I did, but two hours earlier, so I’ve removed my redundant link
Amateur and aspiring professional young artists in the Internet age are starting to have a decent grasp of this from the start thanks to social media–there’s a lot of spreading and sharing of this kind of language in, say, DeviantArt’s ToS, as well as widespread awareness posts by artists whose work has been stolen by corporations for profit. I don’t think it’s impossible that she went looking for it in the Scholastic T&C.
Yeah, you could be right, and that case with the Washington cartoon sounds awful. Speaking for myself as an artist and freelancer, I read every contract I sign and don’t sign if there’s any bullshit that can’t be amended. I’ve been hosed before by a gallery so I try to be careful, but it’s not always easy… It’s all too natural to invest trust in people that don’t automatically deserve it.
My understanding is that the minor can change their mind and void a contract unless the contract is for “necessaries” So contracts for food, shelter, etc. actually ARE enforceable, but good luck getting a counterparty to agree to it. I think that there is some debate over how long an adult would have to declare that they had changed their mind after they reached the age of majority. By not notifying scholastic of their intention to void the contract soon after reaching the age of majority, the former child would have effectively affirmed it. Scholastic was probably banking on the possibility that if any of their entrants later became successful and famous, they would still have the rights to their earliest work.
Hi, father here. I hope Sasha’s story didn’t come off as if she had unilaterally read the Terms. I happened to take a look (which I admit I don’t always do) and was pretty much completely surprised. I thought it could become good opportunity to explain what it seemed to mean to me, and why it might matter to her. We discussed pluses and minuses of whether she should submit anyway. In the end, she felt it was wrong for them to claim ownership of her work, and she didn’t like how hidden it was.
Smart attorneys wouldn’t do that; neither would I, and I am not that great of an attorney. Unfortunately a lot of in-house attorneys’ default response to everything is “no,” instead of “let’s find a legal and ethical way to make this work for everyone involved.”
Would be interesting to see how they respond if she were to submit her work to the competition, but cross out the offending terms on the contract before signing.
More generally, I’d be interested in a model where consumers, en-mass, could mark-up the TOCs, removing the objectionable sections, and ask the vendor to effectively enter into a different contract. In business, we do that for virtually all contracts, but in that case there is nowhere near the asymmetry of power that exists when large corporations deal with individual consumers one at a time. When our smallish company deals with very big companies, we do get a bit squashed on this stuff, but still not like an individual consumer does.
I am picturing a wiki-type model where collectively, consumers agree (over time) with each other on desirable modifications to particular corporate TOCs (e.g. iOS), then present it back to the corporation as a condition of what would essentially be a mass-purchase-or-not decision for the company. One person, insisting on a modification to Apple’s TOC when they buy their iPhone and try to start it up will fail, but a million consumers, all with the same beef? That’s a different story. I kind-of imagine that I would use a plug-in to automatically search the wiki for the relevant consensus-marked-up TOCs (whenever and “I agree…” box comes up), review, make my own edits if I wanted to, then hand that back to the corporation, saying, “accept these modifications or no sale”. With (and here’s they key) a LOT of consumers also doing it alongside me. (Who knows, tracking and verifying the most agreed/recent/relevant/valuable markup might be a blockchain-susceptible problem.)
I can think of several reasons off the top of my head:
The corporation does want to retain the option to re-use the individual’s work. Not being able to is a non-starter.
But for how long do they wish to retain that right? If you ask the client that, it becomes a Thing they have to Discuss and–god forbid–actually Make a Fucking Decision about. Easier for the attorney to assume “forever” so they don’t have to open that can of worms with the client.
If the client does only want limited or non-permanent rights to the image, it then becomes someone’s job to monitor and maintain which images they have the rights to and when those rights expire, and to edit/republish existing material with new material every time they lose the rights to something. Who wants to do that when it really is so much easier to just take all the rights forever?
“Belt and suspenders”: the business term for ensuring your ass is covered every which way, no matter what. Again, using terms like “in all contexts” and “in perpetuity” in your contract are great for this. The attorney is just doing their attorney job here.
Not that I approve of any of this, and I agree with you that it’s a practice that can be bad for business (and human!) relationships, but not being a jerk is apparently too much work for some people.
