Sunday Mailbag: Reselling Art Copyrights?

Q: You have an extensive online library of caricature work going back years. Do you get approached about the further commercial use of that work for things like t-shirts, food and drink labels etc? If so, how do you work it, and in particular, work out your fee?

A: That does sometimes happen, although since most of my work is done for very specific uses that serves a particular narrative, a given illustration seldom ends up working for a different purpose. Every once and awhile, though…

What is being asked about here is when an artist sells the rights to use an illustration that was previously done for another client to a new client. This is a practice that is perfectly fine as long as the original illustration was done under an agreement that did not include copyright ownership by the client, either under a work-for-hire agreement or one that specifically transfers the copyright permanently to the client. The artist owns the copyrights to an image he/she creates unless they specifically bestow those rights to another party via a legal agreement. The bestowing of those copyrights for a specific purpose do not prevent the creator from also bestowing rights to that same image to yet another party or parties.

When you do a freelance illustration job, the client is buying not the art itself but the right to reproduce the art i.e. “copyright” for a specific purpose. In the case of a magazine illustration, the publisher might buy the rights to publish the illustration once in their magazine. An agreement might also include online rights to the same illustration, reprint rights should the article get reprinted in a “year end” issue or something similar, or additional rights. An agreement might limit the geographical range of the use (say “North America”), circulation, the date range an illustration can be reproduced, or other specifics. Conversely, a client agreement might require a date range for “exclusivity”, which would mean the artist could not sell copyrights to that image to another party until that exclusivity period is over.

If the copyrights to an image is not limited by a previous agreement, the creator is free to sell those rights to anyone else.

So what do you charge in such an arrangement? In theory, the same amount you’d charge to do an illustration from scratch. After all, what the client is REALLY buying in any illustration job are the rights to an image. The fact that the artist has to also create the image should be incidental. In reality it’s a little different. Clients are much more inclined to pay an artist more to create an image than they would be to use a “stock” image, or one that is already done. I generally charge less for the rights to use an illustration I’ve already done than I do to create one from scratch. How much less depends on the client. If it’s a big client like a major magazine or corporation, I would charge about the same as I would charge to create a new image. If it’s a smaller client, like an independent/small press publisher or smaller company, I’d start at about half the costs of doing something new and go from there. In some cases, like someone asking for the rights to use some image for a presentation or a website, I’d charge some token amount. I sometimes just grant someone permission without compensation if it’s for some personal project, just because they really don’t have a budget and I want to reward people for respecting copyrights enough to ask permission.

One example of my reselling the rights to work I’ve already done is the caricatures I did of all the U.S. Presidents. I originally did them as centerpieces for the tables at the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Awards in 2015 in Washington DC. Then I did a poster with all of them:

Since then I have sold the rights to individual images and all of them to several different clients, including doing color versions for a book:

I even sold the rights to a few to be used on some types of medical scanning equipment that are apparently named after certain presidents. Strange but true.

Thanks to Allan Cavanagh for the question. If you have a question you want answered about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!