What Rights Should I Sell?

Last week (May 4) I provided some basic copyright information. Let's assume that you've developed your original idea to the point where a television network or some other entity wants to buy it. What rights should you license?

The buyer will want as many rights as possible for as little money as possible. For example when I licensed shows I started by requesting all rights in all media in perpetuity. As a seller, your goal is to get the network to pay as much as possible for each right, and reserve as many rights as possible for yourself. The outcome of your negotiations will depend upon the relative strengths of your positions -- how much the buyer wants your idea, and how desperate you are to sell. Knowing the rights you have available to sell is the key to maximizing the value of your content.

For the sake of this post, we'll assume you have a television idea. The first thing you want to negotiate is territory. Are you selling U.S. rights only, or U.S. and Canada? What about Asia? Don't ever just throw in worldwide rights to the program. There can be great value in that. The British producers of the show 'Pop Idol' make a great deal of money selling the rights to that show around the world. You know it in the U.S. as 'American Idol.' They would have left a fortune on the table if they licensed worldwide rights to the first network that asked.

Networks will also want the right to use footage on the internet. They may even ask for the right to post the show on their web site, or on a content aggregator like Hulu. If they want the right to use your program on the web, they should compensate you for it.

Make sure you have a plan to exploit any rights you do retain. If you have no plans to put your show on the internet, there's no harm licensing those rights to your buyer. Just make sure you're getting fair value for them. Remember in an earlier post I reminded you that 2% of something is better than 100% of nothing.

There are other rights to negotiate in addition to internet and territory. I will discuss them in an upcoming post.