http://www.roberthuitt.com/Commission%20agreement.htm
That. Primarily considering property rights and intellectual property rights. Looking through all of the old emails and all of that kind of thing displayed on this site, I have not once seen any form of this. I just figured of all the places to throw this out there so that it might be of some good, this might be the best. I've seen a lot of stuff where there are definite blurs between where a copyright starts and where it ends, so why not write it out? A simple version would be:
The character(s) represented within this piece are intellectual property of _________ and the title of ownership for said piece, upon full completion of payment, is transferred from __________ to ___________.
Pretty much states, legally as soon as a signature is placed, that the characters represented within the drawing belong to someone, so regardless of whether or not you own the drawing, you might or might not own the right to use the character, but also states clearly that the drawing/illustration itself is property of the one who is buying it. That means they can do with it as they wish.
Stops the abuse of the art piece outside of its decided purpose, but at the same time gives ownership of what was paid for. And if they want to paint a mustache on their nice new piece of property, they can. You do not have copyright over what is drawn, but you do have ownership over the physical drawing. The TOS of commissioners rarely seems to cover such stuff and are, from what I can tell, only thinly legally binding at best.
But I figured I would throw this out there. And again, apologize for doing anything wrong, lord knows I probably did.
Edit:
Okay, obviously, this is being misconstrued.
No, I do not mean that all artists should copy paste this in to their TOS. As I have been informed, the wording is horribly off and shouldn't really be used and all that wonderful stuff.
The main point of this was for people to at least be aware of certain aspects of ownership that might or might not be included in TOSs, something found in almost all offline art commissions. So, forget that I wrote anything about the entire transferrance thing at least be willing to talk to an artist as to the rights involved with a piece.
This isn't levying blame at one party, it's the responsibility of both to understand it and acknowledge that it is something that exists. I just meant that artists might want to think about adding something like this to their TOS and that commissioners should be on the look out for them just to understand what they are buying.
Nothing more.
Again, the example was not : "I think you should all add this."
It was simply : "Hey, something like this might be useful." Of course, with more actually looking in to what is accurate and possible to use.
