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Comment by tgb | Hacker News Reader

If you hire an artist to paint a landscape for you, do you have total ownership of that painting? Could you recreate it digitally and sell it? Assume no extra rights were explicitly transferred, just a standard commission of a piece of art, whatever that entails.

I would have assumed that the answers to these were both yes, but this article makes me think not.

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You don't. It's a common topic in game development that if you hire a contract artist that the contract needs to explicitly state that you retain the rights of the work they produce for your project, otherwise they can yank those rights should you have a falling out.

At least here in BC, something like this applies to code as well. It's considered written work in the same way as a novel, so any developers hired or contracted need to explicitly sign over their "moral rights" to the work.

Not in the USA and most countries.

Purchasing art does not give me the right to copy and resell it, Ok; but contracting an artist surely gives me the right to copy and resell the art?

Or are you saying that the contract must explicitly state what formats are included in the contract?

The contract would have to explicitly give you the right to copy, yes.

All of the statet rights belong to the artist and better be explicitly transferred to you in a contract. Including the formats and the right to edit. Just about everything you can Imagen...

Between a wedding, maternity and newborn photos (x2), I can tell you that just because you're paying somebody to take pictures, does not mean you have any copyright. People (esp. small-time people) are starting to sell the rights but it's far from a given and it has to be stated in the contract.

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