During the panel I hosted at C2E2
and another one I listened to, the concept of reversion came up multiple times.
Since I believe reversion rights are an important concept for creators to
understand and to ask for, I’ll talk a little more in-depth about it today.
Reversion
rights are when the rights you have granted to someone, e.g., the right to
adapt your comic book into a film or TV show, automatically return to you.
Typically, this occurs because of conditions set forth in your contract, such
as a failure to raise enough capital within a set amount of time, failure to
produce and distribute the movie/TV show within a set number of years, or it
can even be a continuing progression of achievements that must be met in order
for the other party to retain the rights to your work. If you do not have reversion rights, or termination rights, in your contract, you might not be able to reclaim the rights you have transferred.
Reversion
and termination are similar, but are structured differently. As I said before,
reversion occurs if certain conditions aren’t met in the contract, and it’s
typically supposed to occur without any action on your part. If the other party
doesn’t meet the requirements, the rights come back to you on a certain date. It
can also apply to all of the rights granted in the contract or only to some.
Depending on the deal, a reversion could be the effective termination of the
agreement, or the deal may continue with some of the rights returning. Termination
provisions, while often dealing with similar subject matter, usually require an
action on your part—a notification to terminate—in order for the contract to be
terminated, and once a contract is terminated, the relationship is over.
Reversion
rights are important because it places an obligation on the party licensing the
rights to your work to actually do something with those rights. Otherwise, they
will lose the rights they’ve acquired. Reversion gives creators an easy way to
regain unexploited or underutilized rights to your work and, hopefully, license
them to someone else. You get more opportunities to see your work adapted into
other media and more chances to make additional money.
