UPDATE: thanks to Twitter, there’s been a burst of activity about this section of Gamer/Law. Part 5 of this 20 part series is coming later this week!
Contracts are pretty important in any games or tech business (or any business at all for that matter). I spend at least half of each working day working on contracts or answering questions about them, in fact. But they can be complicated: lots of time and money is spent getting them right as well as fighting over them when they go wrong. Just as importantly, in my experience a lot of time that SHOULD be spent on making a contracts work isn’t spent on it at all, with consequences for the contract and the business down the line. Unfortunately, the games and digital media industries aren’t immune to this: in fact, being such a young industry, contract problems come up all the time.
So, I thought I’d write a series of posts specifically about contracts, which I’m going to call “20 Contract Questions” (with a hat-tip to Nicholas Lovell here, who started me thinking about a series like this after I saw his 50 finance/VC questions series together with Nic Brisbourne, as well as to Will Luton of Mobile Pie for some recent tweets about the importance of contracts).
Anyway- the first few posts are going to be about contracts generally and the remainder will be about specific legal issues you’ll commonly come up against when dealing with a contract. Here they are:
- What is a contract?
- How do I get to the contract stage?
- How do I read and write a contract?
- What does this contract mean?
- How should I negotiate a contract?
- How do I change or renew my contract?
- How do I say what I want them to do?
- What should I say about IP in the contract?
- How should the financial stuff work in my contracts?
- Allocating risk part 1: representations and warranties
- Allocating risk part 2: indemnities and limitation of liability
- How do I keep things confidential?
- What are boilerplate clauses?
- What do I do if someone breaches my contract?
- How do I terminate a contract?
- What does governing law mean?
- What is dispute resolution?
- Contracts you need, part 1
- Contracts you need, part 2
- So what were you trying to tell me? A contracts checklist
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