Q: I have a question about protecting intellectual property - Novels to be precise.
I had an idea for a novel. I told a friend at work about it. He introduced me to his brother who is a film student. Long story short, we worked out a plan for the 3 of us to work on the novel with the clear understanding the idea and final decisions would be mine to make since the story idea, concepts, characters, and pretty much everything else about it comes from me. I agreed to this set up because I am a procrastinator, but will complete things when I feel someone is counting on me. Despite the fact that I am doing +80% of the work, I have verbally agreed to only taking 50% of the potential sales of this book only. I am okay with that for this book only. One brother is acting as my primary editor and both are sounding boards for ideas. This experience has taught me that I do not need them to write the other books. I want to make sure that if I decide to go it alone with the follow up stories (5 of them) that they cannot try to claim ownership on them. We have no issues currently.
A: The best practice is to have a contract that specifies who owns what. If left to a verbal agreement, the others may be able to claim rights to their contributions and/or rights to the follow up stories as joint authors of derivative works.
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