Legal Advice for Authors and Scriptwriters
Discover how partnering with a media and entertainment lawyer can help protect your artistic vision in the dynamic world of producing and scriptwriting. In this blog, we explore the crucial role of legal advice for media professionals, focusing specifically on scriptwriting. In this post, we look into the legal considerations that arise during the script development process, highlighting the expertise of media lawyers in safeguarding the creative endeavors.
Do Authors, Writers and Scriptwriters Really Need Legal Advice?
If you are a scriptwriter, then obtaining legal advice would be particularly important if you’re not represented by an agent yet. Once you have an agent, the agent is likely to either have access to an in-house or external lawyer.
Before signing up with any agent, you should ask to what extent they will provide you with legal advice and assistance in contract negotiation in addition to the commercial and business development advice that you will undoubtedly get.
If you are an author or scriptwriter and you do not have an agent (yet), then an experienced media and entertainment lawyer would also be able to help you negotiate the terms of any contract with a producer or production company.
Either through an agent or a lawyer, you should ensure that:
You protect your IP by entering into a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) or confidentiality agreement with any producer or production agreement who has agreed to read your treatment or script.
You protect your ancillary rights by carefully thinking about which rights you would like to grant the producer and which rights you would like to keep for yourself.
You protect your commercial position by negotiating the delivery and payment milestones – as well as any polishes and revisions included in those milestones – carefully.
Scriptwriting - Some Legal Considerations
Before you send your script to a producer or production company that you would like to partner with, you should first ask whether they are accepting treatments and/or scripts. That is because a lot of production companies do not accept unsolicited scripts, because they are worried that they might – coincidentally - produce a similar project at a later stage. If they do, then they could be faced with a lawsuit, whether or not they actually read your treatment or script, or not.
If the producer or production company has confirmed that they are interested in your treatment or script, I would ask them to sign a simple non-disclosure agreement (NDA) or confidentiality agreement.
There are several ways of getting from idea to script and there are considerations that comes with each of those ways: if you have written a treatment and a producer has agreed to pay you to write a script based on that treatment, then you and the producer would enter into a scriptwriter agreement. It’s important to think carefully about the delivery and payment milestones, as well as about the revisions and polishes that would be included in those milestones. I have written about writer agreements before and you can read more about them here.
If you have already drafted a script which the producer wants to use with either no or minimal changes, then the producer might offer you an option agreement. I have written about option agreements before and you can read more about them here.
In both cases it’s important to think about the rights that you want to keep. Some scriptwriters are happy to licence all adaptation rights to the producer. Others want to keep some for themselves – for example, you might want to adapt the script into a podcast series or write a book based on the script. Those rights would need to be expressly ‘reserved’ in your agreement with the producer.
Contracts and Compliance - Partnering with Media Lawyers: Next Steps
I offer tailored advice to producers, filmmakers and scriptwriters and all matters related to English entertainment law. I qualified as a solicitor in England in 2014 and have worked in the film and tv industry since September 2014 – I have worked for both financiers and investors as well as producers and scriptwriters and am passionate about providing commercial, no-nonsense legal advice.
I offer an initial call for free so that I can assess whether your matter is something that I can help you with and so that you can decide whether or not you want to work with me. Please get in touch here.