You asked your legal, copyright, and trademark questions, and Jean has answered! All questions are culled from the comments section attached to the original ‘Ask Jean’ post. We invite you to ask more questions.

Hi Jean,

I have a client that publishes a directory. In the past, the client has sold franchises to private owners who then used me to design and layout the book. Recently, they sold a franchise to a large publisher who can produce the book on its own. My client wants me to give the original files to this franchisee so that it can use them as a template. I have a signed contract from my client stating that I own the rights to these files.

So, what is normally done in a situation like this? How would I go about licensing these files? What would be a reasonable fee?

Drew Taylor

Dear Drew,

You should have an IP lawyer familiar with copyright law prepare a copyright license agreement. The agreement should speak to many issues, including how long the template can used and whether or not it may be sub-licensed.

As for pricing, it’s more an art than a science.

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When Mac OS X introduced the Dashboard, we were fascinated by the thousands of available widgets that display news, track stocks, watch the weather, find song lyrics, and so on. But eventually, you run out of words that must be translated to Dutch, and the Panda Cam gets old pretty fast.

Fortunately, your Dashboard can actually help you work, instead of just distracting you. You may have already checked out the Adobe Labs kuler widget, which features tons of user-submitted color palettes. I mentioned it in a post some time ago when it was pretty much one-of-a-kind. Today, there are many other color selection widgets, such Color Theory and ColorBurn. The former works in a manner very similar to Illustrator’s Live Color and helps you choose a color palette, while the latter delivers an inspirational new palette every day.

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Designers will appreciate the SeeSS widget by Guy D2, which serves as a great reference for a wide range of CSS properties. It’s a bit buggy but still very useful. I do hope we’ll see a revised version soon, as I like its simple interface. (more…)