TheGillwoman wrote: ↑Fri May 08, 2020 9:28 am
I'm interested to know how folks are handling the legal part of co-writes. The collaboration agreement my lawyer drew up for me is a Co-Publisher agreement that hands all the admin duties - from pitching to collecting to everything admin related - to me. On the one hand, I can see how messy it would be to have all collaborators involved trying to do all of those things at once, and how it makes sense to pick an administrator for each tune. On the other hand, I can see how each writer would want to take advantage of whatever relationships he/she has in order to get the tune out in the world.
I do what I call co-publishing agreements for this purpose. However, I only do those when I am getting to the point of being ready to exploit the song in some way (e.g. to release a recording myself, to license the song for another artist to use, etc.). I call them co-publishing agreements, rather than collaboration agreements, because my collaborators also own their publishing for our songs, and it is our publisher hat that has the ownership of the copyrights in the sense of splits for performance rights and such. Also, they go beyond typical collaboration agreements to spell out some specifics for licensing the songs. Prior to the point of doing such agreements, any informal agreements will just be via emails and the such, and, at least to date, I've always just done equal splits.
As for those co-publishing agreements the main reason I've done those is that most of my co-writers are not experienced, or even very active, on the business side of music. Especially in the cases of co-written songs I'm recording myself and putting out there in some way, I understand the time-sensitivity of any opportunities, where even a few hours, no less a few days or longer, could be critical. And having a single point of contact for both the recording and the song minimizes the potential that delays will sink an opportunity. (In the more distant past, when I was licensing songs only to indie artists, I had a number of cases of multi-way mechanical license agreements that took elapsed weeks to get completed. While it didn't prevent any cuts on that front, it did make it very clear to me that such delays would not be acceptable in many contexts.)
My co-publishing agreements allow both (or all in the case of more than two co-writers/co-publishers) parties to exploit and administer the songs, subject to paying the other parties their shares. They do not provide any extra share for administration, and they do specify that any performance rights go directly to the co-writers' PROs for both writer and publisher shares. They also specify things like not being able to incur costs on behalf of the other without explicit agreement, other than agreeing to register the copyright and split that cost. They also specify that the agreements cover only non-exclusive uses. For any exclusive uses, those would have to be agreed by both parties, and a separate agreement may be added if there are known opportunities that would require exclusivity. Another area is that they allow any of the parties to assign their own publishing to another publisher, but not the other parties' publishing, and such assignments would need to be subject to the terms of the co-publishing agreement.
Really, the point of all this has mostly been to provide a legal framework to allow me to use my co-written songs with my recordings for various different types of uses. However, especially in the case of one deceased co-writer, where I had to make the agreement with the co-writer's son, it also made it feasible to do mechanical licenses of one of our songs for a low-budget indie (really DIY) cut without having the admin to deal with the cut cost more than the proceeds from the cut. And I do include considerations regarding heirs in these agreements to be safe.
Most of the rights granted in my agreements are pretty similar to the defaults in US copyright law, but just get spelled out in one agreement. However, there are a few additional bits to cover gray areas and formalize some specific considerations.
Rick