Dear All
A review has recently taken place of the rights categories currently on ECS. It appears that a large amount of title specific rights categories have appeared over the years which either duplicate other rights categories or are no longer used. A proposal has been put forward to consolidate the current 18 rights categories into 5 IPC specific rights categories which are outlined below with the legal definitions provided in the attached document:
One Use
- One use Only
- Contributor retains copyright
- No embargo period
- Not available for use in brand extensions, International editions, or for syndication
- This rights category would mainly apply to agency stock photographs or model bookings
First Use
- First use in the IPC title in the UK
- Contributor retains copyright
- Embargo period (negotiable) after the date of publication
- Not available for use in brand extensions, International editions, or for syndication
- This rights category would be used with contributors who are essential to use but who refuse to grant any rights to the title or if the commissioned content has no re-use value
First Use with Extensions
- First use in the IPC title in the UK
- Contributor retains copyright
- Embargo period of (negotiable) months after the date of publication
- Available for use in International/licensed editions and free re-use within title and its specials, but not for brand extensions or for syndication
- This rights category would mainly be used for contributors who are unwilling for IPC to syndicate their material but where the title has international editions or wish to have extended use of the material
Qualified Rights
- First use in the IPC title in the UK
- Contributor retains copyright
- Free re-use in title and brand extensions
- Free use in International editions
- Exclusive world-wide syndication for period of copyright with a (negotiable) % royalty to contributor
- This rights category would be used for contributors who are unwilling to assign copyright to IPC or if acquiring ‘all rights’ would be too costly
All Rights
- IPC Media acquires copyright
- This is the preferred rights category where the commissioned content has re-use value.
This category will also apply to model bookings
The category of Case History will also be retained as a payment system for these type of commissions.
There have been slight changes to all commissioning letters and core contributor agreements to come in line with AOL Time Warner requirements. Due to these changes all core contributors will need to sign a new core contributor agreement letter. A document detailing your core contributors has been attached to this email. After consultation with the Editor’s Group it was suggested that some titles may wish the communication with the contributors to come from myself. If this is the case please let me know. Please could you communicate this proposal to your commissioning editors and ECS users and forward to me any objections/problems that you or your teams can foresee with this proposal which we can discuss further. I am happy to attend these meetings with you, if further clarification is needed.
Thank you for your co-operation,
Mark
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