Client Relations
Who owns the project?
After all of your time and effort has been expended to create the final product, what does your client own? Which elements of the production are they not entitled to receive as part of the deliverables?
The answers to these questions are dependent on two primary factors: What is in the contract and what are the conventions of the industry?
If you are a for-hire professional, the traditional understanding is that your client owns everything because they paid you to do the work. You do not have any copyright interest nor an expectation of a royalty if the work you produced is published in any way.
In some professions, like in professional film-based photography, there is (or at least has been) a convention that the client owns the prints to all the photos, but the photographer keeps the negative. In the visual media profession, the understanding is that the client owns everything.
Well, almost everything….
What do you own?
At the conclusion of a project, your client is entitled to receive the final master plus all of the elements that were used as the ingredients for making it. The production elements would include:
- recorded media
- still images and other source files
- graphic animation elements
- data discs from media generated through production
- physical objects that were used in the production process that were purchased specifically for its use
What is missing from this list of production elements?
The missing element is the project file that you created in the process of producing the final master. Project files could be:
- the files you created in Camtasia, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, etc.
- the databases that you generated to organize your material, such as a list for digitizing content or a data file that represents the editing decisions that you made.
The understanding behind this distinction is that a client owns the ingredients in the final product, but they do not own your “secret recipe” for producing the final product. The project files reveal how you did what you did and represents your distinctly creative way of achieving a particular outcome. Retaining your creative privacy is critically important to your viability as a creative professional in the industry. Anyone who understands how a project file was constructed would be able to deconstruct how you did what you did and either imitate or reproduce the type of work that you created, which puts you at risk for losing future business.
If your client has significant experience working in the media production business, they will have ascertained the protocol for your privileged retention of the project file as a convention of doing business. However, if your client has never worked in a for-hire media production project before, it is possible that they may assume that they own everything including your project file. You may need to articulate this arrangement in advance (perhaps in the contract) if you sense that your