fee — or as a royalty — ie a percentage of the revenue from the sale into the secondary market in question. You can find summaries of these industry agreements by clicking on the icons below.

(Remember that the copyright in anything originated by "authors" who are employees of your company (eg staff directors) in the course of their employment belongs to the company. The BBC staff special effects designer who came up with the Dalek never saw a penny of the BBC’s income from merchandising it. This part of this outline guidance applies principally to self-employed freelances engaged by you for the particular project.)

It is essential that you make sure that you either acquire all the rights that you are going to need in order to give your financiers the rights in the finished programme that they need; or that your deals with the owners of these "underlying rights" give you the ability to acquire these rights when and as they are needed, for fees agreed in advance.

For example, it may not make good business sense for you to buy the right to sell the programme into overseas television markets from the outset: you may see the programme as having a life only on UK screens. But if, later, your distributor finds interest from, say, PBS in the USA, you should have made sure that all that has to be done is pay the owners of