Date: Fri, 06 Feb 2004 13:13:46 -0500
Subject: PUPT: rights, royalties, and permissions
From: "Christopher H." <heyhoot-AT-mindspring.com>


Greetings critters, 
 Our company does shows adapted from stories in the public domain, but I
have a question about some issues that I would like to know more about as I
look at some other titles. I would really appreciate answers from people who
have experience in this rather than suppositions, opinions, and
hypotheticals. On to the questions.
 How do you handle rights, royalties, and/or permissions for works that you
perform that are not in public domain or not your own original works?
 Do you pay royalties to anyone who wrote an original work or adaptation
that you perform? How do you determine that rate?
 Do you concider any work written for you by someone in your company the
property of your company or of the person who wrote it? Is this an agreement
in writing for work for hire, an assumption, handled in some other way, or
on a case by case basis? 
 Do you pay royalties to any publishing house (ie Samuel French, Bantam
Books, or the like) for a  work that you perform? How is this rate
determined? Is it a per show rate? A percentage of profit or ticket sales?
Some other formula?
 When you get a script or other work that you then adapt for the puppet
stage how much does it have to change before it becomes a derivitive work
and your own, rather than a edited version of the original?
 Do you have any works that you or your company produced that you have
licenced to others to perform? How did you figure out what to charge? Have
you encountered problems with people not paying for your work? Any problems
with people doing more shows than originally agreed to and not paying you
for the overage? Do you additionally rent or lease puppets for the shows?
How did you come up for the rate for that?
 Do you use music that you pay royalties for? To whom and at what rate? How
and were did you go to get permission to use that work within your show?
Have you ever commissioned someone to write music for one of your shows? Did
you pay them a fixed rate and you own the work or do you pay them some sort
of royalty? If you pay them some sort of royalty, how did you come up with
that rate? I know some of the musicians on this list may have encountered
this in reverse - as in you wrote a piece for someone and got paid x. Feel
free to answer this from that view point as well. When would you do a work
for hire where the client retained the rights to that work and when would
you retain the rights and charge an ongoing royalty? 
 How might one contact a living arthor to obtain permission to adapt their
work? 
 At what point does a work become derivative? When a work is "based on the
work of X" how do you title and sell that work? For example, all of the
derivative "Star Wars" books - would they have written the book first and
submitted it to George Lucas and/or the publisher for permission to publish
it or would they have to get permission to write it first? I know that may
not be a great example as some of those works were undoubtably commissioned,
but I hope you get the drift of my "which came first the chicken or the egg"
question. I can't see someone writing a long derivative work and then
submitting it for approval, but then I can't see someone approving someone
to write something without seeing something fairly substantial first.
Perhaps I am not seeing this acurately since I am not a writer by trade.
Maybe there is a compromise - a sample of the work submitted for approval,
or the like.
 So many burning questions, so many hot answers waiting out there.

Thanks,
Christopher


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