Copyright? Right, copy that.

Hey Hey, terms of ownership come down to intellectual property, copyright, trademark, fair use, infringement, and cease & desist orders. Are you excited?

Actually, copyrighting and infringements in the creative business are really interesting things because ownership is tough to pinpoint. If you freelance an illustration and have the rights to it, then someone has to pay you to use the image, similar to a stock photo website. But if you work for the company and do that same illustration, it may be the companies, not yours.

It’s like after I finished with IBM…they told me I could use the jpgs for my portfolio, but I couldn’t take any of the working files with me because they belonged to IBM. Because IBM paid me to design it, it is therefore theirs. Makes sense, but kind of stinks.

But then there’s fair use. And yeah, fair use says I’m allowed to show the jpgs for my portfolio. It also would go towards showing other work to potential employers when/if I get and leave a job. So there-in lies an importance to correctly describe the exact details of your role in a specific job. If you only designed the logo, it would be in your best interest to mention it…because hey, the same finished piece may very well end up in more than one portfolio…hence collaborative efforts in college kind of stink.

Baron is basically saying to give credit where credit is due. You can’t claim sole responsibility for work that you’ve done for major companies, et cetera. While some of my projects at IBM were mine from sketch/idea to post production, I give my mentor, Garrett, credit for his help. Really, when you think about it, if it weren’t for him I wouldn’t have had the job. So naturally, he helped me. And even though I created the idea, I don’t own the rights to it. Amazing.

It all comes down to circumstances.
Was I working as an employee or as a freelancer?
Was it a work for hire basis?
Where were the traces of teamwork, if any, and what individual rights exist?
Was the assignment of rights clearly established?

And yeah, that’s really all I have to say on this chapter.