I was wondering if some people in this community could share some advice about legal forms and contracts. I have been solely developing a game for 4 months and I am about to have another programmer help me finish it. I know this game has some potential profits. I have a few conditions before collaborating.
That all property and intellectual property belongs to me.
All rights to everything belong to me. I own everything.
All files and property are confidential and cannot be shared with anyone without my permission
That he will receive 30% of final profits if and only if he completes the work I have outlined and does not breach any of these conditions in this agreement. If he does not meet these conditions he will not receive any payments whatsoever.
Do I need to have a legal form with these conditions made by a lawyer or is a paper with these conditions outlined enough? If he signs a form with these conditions is that a legal contract? My question is do I need to have a lawyer involved or can I make the contract myself. Will a signed agreement like that hold up in US court?
Thanks for any advice. I want to make sure we cover everything legally before I have him work on the game.
When I hire people for a small project, I find a well-written contract template on the web and extend it. What you’ve specified may afford some protection but it seems ambiguous compared to many contracts.
All files and property are confidential and cannot be shared with anyone without my permission
For example, what is this property? What if, instead of sharing your files, he shares your discoveries, ideas, algorithms, diagrams, object model, etc? How should damages be calculated? What if he breaches your contract and you fail to enforce it but later it becomes a problem? What if he claims he had a verbal agreement from you to share your files? What if he leaves a full printout of your source code at Starbucks?
Thanks Ostagar for the advice. I was mostly wondering if a lawyer was required or not. That was just a quick example of some conditions, I will make a more in depth one that covers all the bases.
You need a simple and well-written contract for anything like this, or any situation where you’re entering into an agreement with somebody and don’t want to get shafted. You will need to get it looked at by somebody who knows what they’re talking about to ensure it’s correct and fits your list of requirements. You’ll be lucky to find some stock contract on the web for this type of thing, but you’ll be able to get an idea of what you need.
If there is money involved in this game, then you should not be afraid of getting some professional legal advice on this matter. And yes, legal “professionals” all over the world are overpaid chair-warming monsters, but that’s just my opinion.
On condition 4: ensure its outlined in detail with the contract or you can not expect it to really work out in case you decide to “change the details of the specs”. Just a general outline will not legally hold for you and if you decide to ignore the contract this will have corresponding consequences on the ownership of the property created.
