Practical Law 101 For Indie Developers: Not Scary Edition

all right uh so my name is Chris Reed I'm an indie game lawyer uh I don't bite though uh and this is practical law 101 for Indie devs not scary Edition so my love of games started when I was about 5 years old uh watching my brother play Ultima 3 and zorc on our family's Apple 2 and then like an older brother he turned around and threatened me at fist point to sign this contract which my parents preserved which says that I will pay him all my Curren cash Supply if I broke one of the 5 and A4 inch floppies with the games on them not a very good game contract uh so it's not a surprise that a couple decades later I ended up uh with my own law practice where I work with indie game developers and people in the game Space to help them with basically all their legal issues uh I'm proud to announce that we've just hired our first paralal uh I just spoke with him on the phone he's having a little bit of trouble with the billing software but hopefully he'll get it uh with the help of my co-counsel Mr Phoenix right I want to make a quick

disclaimer which is that I am not your lawyer unless I am uh and this presentation is legal education not legal advice but I do hope you learn something uh my goal today is to help all of you identify and avoid common legal pitfalls uh so we've got not a lot of time and the time that it would take to go over everything that I think is important is about this long uh unfortunately as you know we have about enough time for a game of hearthstone maybe two I think that's M Agro I haven't played in a while so we're going to cover five topics uh creating a company contracts intellectual property infringement and privacy for each topic I'm going to tell you why you should care when you should care and what you need to know about it so first topic uh is creating a company and by a company I mean the legal corporate entity

why should you care about this well a company is sort of like the legal equivalent of a suit of power armor it protects you and gives you cool abilities some of these include limited liability uh this means that if there are debts or liabilities that you incur in business they only stick to the company that's all that's at risk not your personal assets which can be very important it also acts as a convenient bucket for intellectual property meaning that you can assign all the rights in the game from the individuals who create the pieces of the game to the company it's all in one place the company can then license it it's a convenient way to share ownership and profits in the company uh it's the way that you figure out who owns what and how voting is handled there are tax reasons we won't get into them because I don't do tax but you should talk to your accountant uh finally on a sort of practical note uh having a corporate entity enables you to be taken more seriously when business dealings most people expect to be dealing with an actual company and not with a group of

people who are individuals calling themselves a studio so when do you need to be thinking about this ideally before you start working at all uh but let's be realistic that's probably not what's going to happen so realistically you should put this together round about the time that you start to get serious meaning putting in a significant amount of time or money into the project in your game and the latest at which you should do this and put together a company is probably before you enter into agreements with other people either co-founders or you start hiring people so what should we know about putting together a company uh there's a couple things you want to discuss with your co-founders or with yourself if you're uh doing it solo first off whether there's going to be any future investment now this may not be the case for a lot of Indies but some people do eventually end up seeking some outside money and that can knowing about that in the future lets you uh make certain decisions and how you structure things um you need to know who owns and controls the company so what are the percentages of own ownership of people

who are actual Founders and not everyone working on it has to be an equity owner um we'll get to that and how is voting handled how do you make decisions in your company these are things you want to discuss and be clear on before you proceed uh there's a technical thing you're going to have to choose which is the type of entity it's mostly a tax issue there are a few differences just be aware you'll have to make this Choice before you go and file to create the entity uh and this is the step where you fill out some paperwork it gets sent to the state usually and there's a fee and this is when the company becomes a real legal entity that means you can go start your bank account you can sign contracts on behalf of the company it's now it comes into existence but that's not the end the last thing you want to do is draft an operating agreement or a shareholders agreement this is the document where all those things you discussed either in your own head or with your co-founders get put down in writing and agreed to formally uh this is important to have in place even if you're a solo the sing member

LLC so companies form one form one early our next issue is contracts and I guarantee you that as Indie developers you are going to encounter at least one contract so why should you care about contracts contracts provide Clarity and predictability uh in any business relationship it's like the rulebook people can go and look and see exactly what the rules are and how it works the simple fact of City down to talk about a contract and negotiate it tends to make people think through more issues than they would have which means that you're less likely to end up in a fight if you've really discussed this stuff and having it signed and in place protects you against the worst case scenario and the best case by that I mean obviously if things go wrong having the contract is good you know what the rules are but it's also the case that sometimes things can go very right and you have sudden unexpected success and people who said yeah it's cool it's free you can use that asset and now that there's money involved they don't feel that way so you

want to have that contract in place before that point comes finally certain things require a written contract to accomplish for your purposes we're talking about transferring intellectual property all right so when do you want to think about contracts repeat after me before you do anything with anyone I couldn't be more clear about this but I think I will be more clear about this before any of the following things which is big scary list feel free to snap a photo but it's in the vault uh we're we're going to be talking today about two specific types of contracts that I think are important the independent contractor or work for hire agreement and Publishing agreements so what do we want to know about contracts well in general there are certain Clauses that come up in most contracts and you should be aware of them the term and termination Clause this means how long does it last how do you get out of it what happens when it gets terminated who pays whom what how's

it calculated speaking of who pays whom it's important to know what people are getting paid not just how much but how on what time frame how it's calculated there's a lot of flexibility with Indies I've seen all sorts of stuff uh hourly hourly with a cap a flat fee uh Milestones a revenue share and combination of these but what's important is it be defined clearly so that both sides know how it works and speaking of defining things clearly you want to also Define the services and deliverables this means the things that each side has promised to do so Services they're going to provide or something they're going to create like an art asset or a soundtrack uh you want it to be very clear what it is not just some music for the game there's also a section in most contracts called warranties and indemnification that most people just sort of skip over because it looks weird this is where each side makes a promise to the other about certain things that they're saying are true and then Pro and the ification is where you say and if

it's not true then I'm the one on the hook practically what does this mean for you that means usually things like promising that you didn't steal the IP it's original work and that someone's not going to sue them if they use it and if they do sue them you promise to be on the hook this is the section where you can take on a li a lot of liability so it's important to know what you're promising and make sure that it's true finally there's a couple other terms that end up at the end of most contracts where you end up getting sued whether you can talk about the contract or the terms of it and whether you might be stopped from competing or bringing along employees from someone that you worked for so let's move on to one of the two types of common contracts that I think you're very likely to encounter and this one is called the work for hire agreement or sometimes known as the independent contractor agreement it is between the developer and the contractor the contractor could be anyone who's contributing something to the game a coder an artist a sound person and it could even be a company that's providing that sort of services as a

company so what do you need to know about work for hire agreements a couple of specific terms that are important first off they're called work for hire because this is the agreement where you assign the IP rights from the contractor to the company we talked about a bucket for IP this is how you take those rights and put them in the bucket so that the company owns all the rights it's very important to have that in place it creates what's called a work for hire Arrangement you also want to be very clear as the developer uh how you're paying them um and you know as we said a lot of flexibility here but make sure that it's clear uh they may ask for some upfront afterwards uh just make sure that you know and if it's a revenue share just make sure it's defined properly you also want to Define again the scope of work this is tied to the deliverables you want to make it clear what's expected you don't just say the soundtrack you say you know up to a minimum of six minutes of music with whatever you know technical

specifications you don't have to go into perfect detail but it needs to be not vague finally you want to know about how you can get out of the contract for a work for hire agreement this usually means what happens if you just not feeling the art and you want to let them go you need someone else well you need to know this is you normally wouldn't be able to get out of the contract unless your termination section has a right for the company to terminate for convenience and if it does well well then the other side is going to want to know hey well what do I get paid what happens when I get terminated is there a kill fee think about these things the next type of agreement uh and this is a very wide range of types of agreements but it would be a development or a publishing agreement uh a lot of Indies even if they develop on their own might consider going to a publisher for things like marketing or it may be an old school agreement where they kicked in money UPF front um this is between the publisher and the developer um it don't tease the post kids so uh what do you

need to know about development and Publishing agreements couple of familiar faces IP rights in this case you're the developer so you want to think am I assigning and selling all the rights the IP rights to my game or am I simply licensing them to the publisher if they're Distributing and if I'm licensing that's not just one thing there's a difference between Licensing in one country on one platform for a year and Licensing worldwide on all platforms forever uh so you need to read that and know what your act licensing because you're the one getting paid it's doubly important to know how that works uh in a publishing Arrangement usually there's some kind of Revenue share agreement and that means you should know how revenue is defined what kind of things are deducted before you make that split um and you should know if there's any kind of recruitment where the publisher take you know makes back their money before you see a dime all these things it shouldn't be one sentence it should be a detailed section so if it looks short you should be worried it's vague

next I want you all to be aware of scope creep uh this comes up in the context of when you as a studio are being hired to make someone for someone else uh which isn't always but if it's the case you can have a situation where you've agreed to do it for a certain budget and they keep asking for changes and changes and changes and new features you want the ability to say this increases the scope of what I agreed to you need to pay me more or we're not doing it but you need that right in the contract or you can't say that another thing that comes up often with publishing agreements are what are called derivative works these means things that are based on your game so for your purposes that means prequels sequels DLC but can also mean any type of merchandising you know Candy plush toys whatever uh and also things like adaptations Comics movies Um this can be quite lucrative in a big deal depending on how the how the story of your brand goes and sometimes these end up in a publishing agreement where you're agreeing to just give them oh and 30% of all this derivative works as if that's nothing make sure you decide decide whether or not it makes sense for your

developer to or your publisher to be involved and who's making the decisions about these derivative works and who's going to pay to develop them finally yet again make sure you know how to get out of a bad deal you want a termination Clause that enables you to leave if things aren't going well uh a practical way to do that either you have a limited term so that's only for 2 years and then you can decide or if it goes longer you might want a clause that says look you need to meet Mr publisher Mrs publisher I'd like you guys to meet a a minimum amount of money that you're going to make me in the first year and if you don't hit that I get to take my ball and go home I could do it better myself or with someone else so uh contracts are everywhere we only covered two of the main types because we don't have a lot of time but make sure to read them and the terms are important our next topic is intellectual property which I'm sure you've heard of and we've already mentioned it a bit so let's get into some details there are a bunch of types of

intellectual property but for Indie developers I think by far the most relevant on a practical level are copyright and trademarks there's a few others that can come up but they're very unlikely and we're not going to go over them much patents are things like novel software algorithms maybe if it's a physical thing um they're very expensive to get they might be narrow in terms of the protection uh trade secrets are things like customer lists pricing models things that you keep secret for business advantage and right of publicity is when you deal with the name and likeness of a cele or a public figure so why should you care about intellectual property well it turns out that there might be a few parts of your game that involve intellectual property like say yeah like all of it basically uh with one very important exception that we're going to discuss so uh moving on when should you be thinking about intellectual property you should be thinking about intellectual property as far as copyright goes before it is created and this is where we need to go back to those work for higher agreements get

those in place then let the person start working ideally don't do it 10 months later and when the game is released you should consider registering your copyright this is not compulsory you don't have to do this but it's helpful and it's cheap for trademarks you should think about registering them and thinking about them before launch meaning that before you choose your name and design a sweet logo you should do a little bit of research at least run a Google search make sure there isn't some other game out there called OverWatch oops yeah uh it's important you could save a lot of money by running a a search so um you should do it as soon as practical if you want to register it takes money and sometimes you don't have the budget for this but it will come later so what do you need to know about copyright well copyright protects fixed expression of ideas which is lawyer speak for your creative content so that means things like the dialogue the ux the animation the art assets the sound the music uh and even the code uh it's a

lot of almost all of what goes into your game but importantly it does not protect abstract ideas this is the exception I talked about your game rules your mechanics the idea behind the game are not protected on their own which is tough because it's often the inspiration for the game this is why we can have a million match three games and not have them infringe each other finally I want to note that uh by default at least under us copyright law by creating something that's copyright protectable you own the copyright period you don't have to register it there's nothing you have to file you own it because you made it that's the default rule that's why it's important to have those work for higher agreements we talked about so that you override that default and it's owned by the company what else to know about copyright copyright gives you the following rights for your purposes the important ones are the ability to reproduce and distribute and to make derivative works and not coincident these are the things that are usually at issue in a

publishing agreement so let's move on to trademarks uh often confused with copyright they are not the same thing the purpose of trademarks is to protect Brands and consumers understanding of who made what so they protect things like titles company names logos and taglines there are two sources of how you get trademark protection the first in the US is called common law rights and that comes from as soon as you start selling something using a trademark and the selling part is important you start to acrew rights from that date forward it's kind of like an XP bar that fills up over time gradually um it's based on how widely you've sold it how well it's known it might be a little more difficult to prove so there's another source of protection which is to go ahead and register federally this takes an actual application process that could be rejected it does come with certain fees I tell people to expect around 1,500 total um but but it gives you some

benefits if you ever end up in court it means that your trademark unequivocally applies equally across the entire territory and yes there are similar processes for the EU and other territories um and most importantly it lets you call dibs in advance before you've sold your game so that's the exception to the you have to use it not forever in advance but up to three years in advance if you need that much time and as we said in order to get your trademark rights other than using it in advance you must use it in Commerce meaning selling it for money so what does this mean announcing your Game's name on your Dev blog two years before it comes out does not give you any trademark rights when you start selling the game that's when you start to acrw the rights um and that's why it's so interesting and useful that registration lets you get ahead of that a little bit finally the strength of a trademark is based on how distinctive it is something that literally describes uh what you do game company jumpy platform trademark something that is totally arbitrary is a

good trademark so intellectual property pretty complicated topic this is super oversimplified but make sure to be aware of it know what you own via contracts and protect it our next topic is I think a sore one for a lot of people uh it's infringement and why should you care about it well I think you all know why you should care about it it takes away profit it takes away Revenue uh it can tarnish your brand it's just not a lot of fun so when should you be thinking about it well as far as registering your different types of IP for copyright again you should register at release just to get it out of the way because it's simple then you don't have to think about it or at the very latest before you might end up suing someone or at least threaten to sue them because having copyright registered multiplies the damages you can ask for it basically just makes the hammer you're threatening them with really really big

for trademark you should do this as soon as practical right I think you should register it before the game comes out but practically you might not have the budget so wait until the you know wait until your your budget and your Revenue justifies it as far as responding to trademark infringement or copyright infringement I would say do it as soon as you notice uh don't don't snooze on it so let's talk about copyright infringement and specifically about cloning um I regret to inform you that copyright infringement does not have a Magic Bullet solution uh it's difficult to prove in the legal sense there's this term substantial similarity which makes it sound like it's common sense but it's not when it comes to the legal side of it it may be obvious common sense but uh a lawsuit is expensive and you may not win but there are practical things you can do so someone is cloning your game or has stolen art assets or sound directly from you first thing you could do is to send a ceent assist letter this goes to the infr cringer and it says hey we noticed you stole our stuff you need

to stop doing it by this time or else you can also send a request to the content host so you could send it to Apple or to steam to ask them to take down the offending infringing content this is done under the copyright context by what's called a dmca takedown notice it's a formalized process there's a couple of requirements most things like Steam and apple have a walkthrough for it now I am aware that these have a pretty bad reputation in some quarters uh I like to think of them basically as lightsabers uh they could be used for good or for evil uh and in this case you're using them for good uh you should register the copyright if you haven't already when you notice the infringement and then you could sue uh again a lawsuit tens of thousands of dollars minimum um you may not win uh so it does happen uh people do Sue in Triple Town uh usually it ends up in a settlement it's very expensive and cost prohibitive for most Indies so let's move on to trademark in infingement which is when people have names for games that are confusingly

similar to the public uh which can be a real issue especially in Mobile where everything's you know in the same list and Floppy Bird good example some of the solutions are kind of the same you can send a cease and desist letter to the infringer and I want to note that the tone of these doesn't have to be universally aggressive um I think a lot of people just send out cookie cutter really scary letters and those are Justified sometimes but I like to look at what the situation is who the infringer is and I ask myself what happens if this letter we send ends up on Reddit well will it seem justified or will we seem like total dicks so depending on who you're sending it to you might want to take a softer tone at first uh you can also contact the distribution platforms again while it's not dmca technically Apple steam they all have standard policies for asking for stuff to be removed because of trademark infringement this gets the stuff down and finally I want to note that unlike copyright you do have to

continue enforcing your trademark to keep it strong um if you ignore 20 infringers and then you want to stop the 21st because that's the one you care about they do have a valid argument that your trademark doesn't have as much protection because you never enforced it it doesn't mean you have to stomp on everyone but for instance king.com Banner Saga um it was a very ugly situation but the partwork king.com said yeah we kind of have to enforce our trademark that wasn't um some of the other parts well I leave you to your judgment so uh the takeaways are that there are no Magic Bullets but there are practical things you can do and you should do them early our final topic is privacy which I think is a blind spot for some Indies um a lot of people may think it doesn't apply to them so why should you care about privacy well most if not all games these days collect some amount of user data uh whether it's through you know directly collecting it like um geolocation or through third- party

stuff so even if you're single player puzzle game you've got leaderboards that's taking data from your users putting it elsewhere uh Twitter integration same thing um any payment processing ad networks all of these are privacy issues governments uh specifically the US government state and local and the EU have been getting a lot more aggressive about enforcing privacy issues and they don't just Target big people people can and do get fined uh and they have to pay money um there's obviously a reputational issue stake uh think about how the public is responding to the Apple iPhone issue people are thinking about privacy it matters and finally data breaches they can and they do happen uh Sony is still paying a lot and a lot of reputational damage for the hacks a while back so when should you be thinking about privacy uh I think you should be thinking about it at three times one during development uh because this is the time at which you can decide you know do we really need to track like the geolocation of users or would that just be cool um it's cheaper to take that out

before the game's done you should think about it at launch uh because you need to have a privacy policy in place and you should continue to think about it post launch because things can change an update might add a new feature with a new privacy issue you may start using an ad Network or the uh terms of the people you work with might change and you need to be aware of that so what are the best practices for privacy the main rule for me if you don't need it don't collect it I like to call this the Jurassic Park principle just because you can breed Velociraptors does not mean that you should breed Velociraptors I know they're totally awesome but they can open doors so uh you should know and disclose the third parties that you share your data with uh because you'll be sharing your users data with them that means ad networks that means leaderboards that means uh you know anything that is a third party taking data you need to know what they do with it and you need to disclose it in a prominent and accessible privacy

policy uh this means accessible from you know the bottom of your website everywhere and on the splash screen of your game or at the very least in the main menu um and please please if you remember one thing about privacy do not do this I know it's tempting do not copy paste someone else's privacy policy change the company name and say cool we're done uh because now congratulations you are probably actively lying to your users because you have no idea what's in there and probably don't do what it says uh that's a great way to get fine so what goes into one of these privacy policies the following things um it should be simple it should be 4ish Pages it should be readable by a real human not a lawyer um and it tells them what you're collecting how you use it uh who you share it with and how they can get access to it and change it if there's a problem and what you're doing to protect it um and you want to be honest this is not the place to hide things you need to disclose everything even if you might not do it if you may do it say you may do

it finally if your game is marketed to people under 13 there is a host of additional things that apply because of a law called Kaa children's online privacy protection act we don't have time to get into it it is a huge morass um my advice would be to talk to a privacy professional avoid collecting personally identifiable information like names pictures and potentially to talk to to uh a company that's called aopa Safe Harbor these are companies that are certified to be able to help you become compliant you pay them they help you so privacy please take it seriously have a privacy policy keep it up to date so uh We've made it through quite quite a large amount of uh potentially dry stuff I'm I'm happy that you came along with me um and with that we've reached the end uh congratulations thank you very much for attending and and I would be happy to take some

questions now and then afterwards in the uh the spillover room and probably at the bar if you find me later too so um great uh happy to take questions I think there's a mic in the middle too you can go there I'm just going to say it's an awesome presentation thank you very much I enjoyed it thank you very much hey um I'm a solo Indie and I was given some advice uh a while ago about starting um a single person LLC uh and specifically I was told that um there's not from the uh if you're being sued and you are a sole proprietor or a single person LLC you are not any more protected than if you uh hadn't formed that Corporation or whatever all is that true or is that uh I mean I again the answer to a lot of these will be it depends because uh which is why this is education not not advice it does

depend on the situation um you will have some level of liability protection but it depends on how you run things I mean the reason that you want to have like a um have the sort of uh the documents in place as far as the operating agreement even if you're a solo is that if you make an LLC but then you just kind of act like a person and you don't do anything you know no formalities you don't keep any records uh from a legal perspective it allows them to argue in a dispute hey this isn't really a company they're just pretending they're a company right it's the same thing as if you have a corporation and you never have meetings and you never take minutes and that kind of stuff those formalities matter um one of the reasons uh definitely as a so proprietor yeah they you don't have any um that that's not a you know an actual corporate entity um but as an LLC one of the other reasons you want to do it Beyond just the uh liability protection is even if it's just you you may work with other people and if you work with them and you don't really have contracts but someone's been working with you for a while you've got

an LLC later on they say hey I thought I remember a conversation where you were going to give me Equity you say no no no that's no no you're a contractor uh that was our agreement he goes well I you know I think I contributed x amount to the company if you don't have the document that says here are the rules I'm the sole owner I'm the manager I have 100% of the equity that can be more of a nasty fight so yeah hi uh thanks that was a really great talk um I'm this might be a very short question have you ever heard of a online tool it's called do contract that some indie game developers put together yes I uh I think I talked to the to the person putting that together uh when they were when they were doing it um I'm yeah so are you is there a question oh no no the the the question was if you're familiar with it because I've used it I used it with the composer on my game I'm just curious yeah how good you feel it is as a contract and if you think that it's worth using or if so I haven't looked in detail at it uh so I can't I can't render an opinion on it without looking at it um I would say that um you know I definitely understand the budget constraints Indie and and the you know the desire to do to use tools like that

um usually you're better off with a contract but here's the big caveat um don't use a tool that you don't understand uh so you know if you having a contract is important but also knowing what it does because if you say yeah yeah just give me the contract that does X as and there may be single sentences in there that do the opposite of what you think they do um and so you know for from my perspective in my practice I I try not to just like fire off a form contract and be like here use this um I like to walk a client through it and say look here's what it's doing is this what you agreed to like does this actually conform to your agreement I want them to be comfortable and it goes back to that whole if you've negotiated thought about it you're not going to be surprised um so you know I I I believe the person who put it together uh had mentioned they talked to a lot of attorneys so uh but I you know I can't give you an official opinion on it I just would say make sure you understand what you use if you get it from from non- lawyer Source cool thank you

yeah hey great talk thanks um just as regards CA could without getting into it I know you said could you possibly clarify on the definition of marketing towards under 1 sure sure so Universal audience include that or not sure so the question was about CA and uh children under 13 and the Privacy Law is there it's a US law um the very broad Strokes are that it applies to uh not just basically any internet operator someone who does stuff on the internet or collects data um and the you are included under it if your product or game uh is targeted at or arguably appeals to in a major way uh people under 13 so yeah any game that's fairly simple might fall under coopa uh the it's concerned with the collection of personally identifiable information so if there's just like if you're randomly collecting you know a a randomized uh unique ID for the phone or whatever that's not as much of an issue as if

you're taking a name or a birthday um so that's kind of how it's defined who's who's under it and you're allowed to collect that stuff but you required to get what's called verifiable parental consent which is this nightmare that's really really difficult because the law was designed for websites in like 99 not for mobile apps um so again one easy way is you may just decide to age gate you put up a things what's your birthday and neutral age gate you don't say are you under 13 you say what's your birthday and you shunt anyone uh who falls under 13 somewhere else um or you put them into a version of the app that doesn't have ads or anything that's going to be collecting uh data that's about as deep as I can go trust me it's a a very deep well so I would talk to a privacy person or uh one of the safe haror companies sure thanks yeah no problem uh hello I had a question about a parody like in if you say you're making a comedic game I like the South par games for example how does does that apply for sure like why do you how do

you say oh this is a parody work and what's a violation so the question was about parody um you know making fun of things which is a copyright question uh and I know uh fair use is a very popular topic on the internet uh I deliberately didn't address it because I wanted to stick to stuff I felt was uh most common in my practice and the number of times it comes up realistically is is is quite limited but in general um copyright infringement happens when you use something that's protected without permission um fair use of which parody is an example not a technical category but an example um fair use is an exception to that so I know this gets technical but uh some someone has described once fair use as the right to be sued by Disney and what they mean by that I mean yeah it's funny but it's also accurate because what they mean by that is fair use you know if if your defense is hey we made this game with Mickey Mouse oh no but we're making fun of him he's drinking booze it's clearly not uh which was actually a case from the' 70s um

basically uh the only time you get to make that argument is in court it's an affirmative defense that means you can't just be like no you can't take us to court because fair use like no no we're suing you if you want to make it your case to the judge why this is fair use you're going to do it in court and by that point you've already spent a ton of money just to have that conversation um what I would say is in general if it's close to the line you're taking on more risk it's a question of risk right right um so it's not there's no uh bright lines here under us copyright law fair use is determined on these like factors which means cool a lot of things could be fair use but it also means to figure out if it really is you have to go to court and that's a game for people with a lot of money unfortunately all right thanks no problem hi thanks for doing this talk oh no problem um how much screen Shake can I legally get away with the question was how much screen Shake can you legally get away with uh you know um as much as you like um I one

of the kind but I think the the way this ties into the talk is I mentioned uh that there were a lot of other types of contracts that come up um one of them is the Ula the end user license agreement um that is one that everyone makes fun of doesn't read like you know it's boring it is important um and that is the section where if your game contains stuff that might be like an epilepsy risk or you know some you know May some medical thing that's where you make the giant all caps disclaimer that says look if this blows up your computer and melts half your face sorry as is bear you know buy or beware um so that is important um and you know anything that might come up through the use of your stuff is handled in the unusual license agreement and those also are not cookie cutter because they should apply to what kind of game you have uh just as a note since I mentioned them ulos are a great place to handle if you've got user generated content that's where you talk about hey do you own the stuff you make in my game do I own it uh if you upload like photos

or something or or anything to my game do we get a license to use it uh you know you want to take care of all that in there so that's yeah good question thank you yeah no problem oh okay uh last question I'm the last question everybody just kidding hey uh as a composer um with smaller projects or smaller teams we Mo usually keep the copyrights in the IP but I know with larger AAA companies and games that become a work for high normally and I was wondering at what point do you see that change over when it comes to like budget or company size or what um so the question was about uh composers and and how sometimes the the IP to the compositions is licensed rather than assigned as a work for hire like we discussed um so it's interesting uh com musicians tend to be actually the place where I see the most uh people requesting that it be a license rather than work for hire and I think that has to do with just the history of the music industry and and musicians being a

little more aware of Ip issues than than other creative Industries traditionally um I would say that it's not necessarily a function of size um it really B it's based on the situation right so from but neither side is trying to screw the other uh what's going on is uh the the developer wants to have it as work for higher because that's so much simpler if they ever need to remix the sound if they're going to put it in a trailer somewhere if they use a snippet of it in the sequel but not the whole thing they just want to know that they don't have to hunt down the person and make sure that it was within the license cuz when you license it you've got to be like what are the exact parameters where you can use it right um so I think that's really something to be negotiated right A lot of times I've seen uh musicians say look um it's this much per uh minute of song If it's a license and I get to sell and then in that case you want to determine who can sell the soundtrack if they sell the soundtrack and they use the name of the game and you know all that kind of stuff um or if you want it you know Lock Stock and Barrel then that's fine but it's going to be more

expensive right uh it so it's not like one or the other it's more what the parties uh need and what they can afford I would say yeah it seems like the one area where it's not necessarily always switched over to the company to own yeah and I I don't know I think that at the lower level you probably don't earn so much and you can actually get a lot of Revenue through soundtrack sales and if you eliminated that then so I think that's yeah it's just a weird Corner area all right I don't know what I'm saying thank you no no that that was very helpful to thank you thank you all right thanks thanks for coming I'll be in the uh and uh