Most creative-technology work is collaborative. Someone writes the software, someone builds the enclosure, someone composes the sound, someone secured the venue. Almost none of it is covered by anything in writing, because at the point where writing it down would be easy — the enthusiastic beginning — it feels both unnecessary and faintly insulting.
Then the piece gets into a festival that wants to tour it, or a brand offers money to use it in a campaign, or one collaborator moves country and stops replying, and the absence becomes expensive.
The one thing to understand first
If you make something together and write nothing down, the law supplies a default. Under US copyright law, work created by two or more people with the intention of merging their contributions into an inseparable whole is a joint work, and each co-author holds an undivided equal share in the entire thing.
Read that twice, because its consequences are not what people assume:
- Equal, regardless of effort. Someone who contributed one evening and someone who contributed six months hold the same share, unless you agreed otherwise.
- Each of you can license the whole work, alone. Any co-author can grant a non-exclusive licence to anyone — a brand, a broadcaster, an NFT platform — without asking the others. They owe the others an accounting of the profits, but not permission.
- It lasts a lifetime and then some. Copyright term for a joint work runs from the death of the last surviving author.
That second point is the one that ends friendships. You do not need a dispute about money for it to hurt; you need one collaborator with a different sense of where the work belongs.
Jurisdictions differ — several European systems require unanimity for exploitation rather than allowing unilateral licensing — so if your collaborators are in different countries, that difference is itself a reason to write terms rather than rely on any default.
The six questions
A useful agreement is short. If it runs past two pages for a two-person project, it is probably solving problems you do not have. Answer these.
1. Who owns the copyright, and in what shares? Equal split, proportional split, or one owner with licences back to the others. Proportional splits feel fairer and create arithmetic you will have to do every time money arrives; equal splits are simpler and occasionally unjust. Pick deliberately.
2. How is it credited? Write the credit line out, literally, as a string of text: “A work by X and Y, sound by Z.” Decide the order and whether it is alphabetical, and state whether the line must appear in any exhibition, press release or documentation. Credit is the compensation most collaborators actually care about, and it is the cheapest thing in the agreement to be precise about.
3. Who can agree to what, alone? The core clause. Typical shape: any single author may approve non-commercial exhibition; commercial licensing, exclusivity, derivative works and sale require all authors in writing. This is you overriding the legal default above, which is the main reason the document exists.
4. What are the reusable parts, and who keeps them? Distinct from the work itself. The custom shader, the PCB design, the sample library, the control software — the components that will be used in other projects. Normal and sensible: each contributor keeps ownership of the tools and code they wrote, and grants the collaboration a perpetual licence to use them in this work. Without this, your own library becomes jointly owned and you need a co-author’s sign-off to reuse it.
5. What happens if someone leaves or goes silent? Give the project a way to continue. Options: a time limit after which non-response counts as approval for exhibition decisions, a buy-out figure, or a rule that the remaining authors may continue to show the work as-is but not modify it. Any of these beats deadlock.
6. What happens to money? Fees, prizes, sales, royalties. Also expenses — who paid for materials, and whether that comes off the top before any split. And who invoices, since one person’s name goes on the paperwork and that person has a tax problem the others do not.
Two things to settle that are not legal
Decision-making. Who decides when you disagree about the work itself? Many good collaborations assign final say by domain: the sound person decides sound. Unanimity on aesthetics is a recipe for a piece nobody made.
Documentation rights. Who can post the work-in-progress, and when? The embargo question has ended more collaborations than the money question, because festivals care about premieres and collaborators care about portfolios.
How to actually do it
Write it yourself first. One page, plain language, the six answers, both names, both dates. A document the two of you wrote and both understand is worth more than a downloaded template neither of you read.
Then, if the project involves significant money, a commissioner, a tour or more than three people, have a lawyer look at your page. That is a much cheaper engagement than asking one to draft from nothing, and the specialist resources for artists — The Artist’s J.D. among them — exist for precisely this scale of problem.
Do it at the start. The agreement is easy to write while everyone still assumes it will never be needed, and that assumption is exactly what makes it fair.
Sources
- Your collaboration agreement does NOT have to be complicated — Kiffanie Stahle, legal strategist for creatives (YouTube)
- Copyright Basics, Circular 1 — U.S. Copyright Office
- How long does copyright protection last? — U.S. Copyright Office FAQ
- The Artist’s J.D.
- Collaboration Agreements Explained (and Why You Need One) — Musical Theatre Writer Guy (YouTube)