Why Reversion Rights Matter

            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.