Plain English

So you’ve looked over the contract for Contributor breakdown and your head’s starting to swim a little bit? Well, fear not, the plain English breakdown is here to help you out!

The first question that many folks who want to create new content ask is:

Q: Why do I have to sign something to contribute? Why can’t I just make something and send it in?

A: One of our contributors said the following things which I think helps make this question a lot easier to understand:

“Y’know, I don’t care about all this legal stuff. I just want to submit stuff and get some credit for it. However, it would piss me off if I saw that someone was making a big profit off my work and I didn’t get anything for it.”

The agreements you sign are here to make sure that everyone is fairly protected, so that no one gets taken happen. This happens by clearly showing folks how to give attributrion, how they can use other people’s work, and how people will be compensated when that work makes money up front. It’s literally as simple as that!

With that said, how does the contributor agreement work?

  1. If you sign the contract and submit it, you’re considered a Depleted Contributor.
  2. After that, when you send in content to us, you’re asking that we consider it as part of the official World of Depleted.
  3. When we receive new content from you, we will determine if it will be certified Canon, certified Apocrypha, or if it will be rejected.
  4. If we accept it as Canon or Apocrypha, we give you a graphic badge that you will use if you want to sell this product yourself.
  5. You don’t lose the rights to your content if we accept it as Canon or Apocrypha, you are simply licensing it to be tied directly to Depleted merchandise, films, and other creations. (In turn, Viking Productions is licensing you to use their property in your content.)
  6. Additionally, this contract gives other Depleted Contributors the right to use your Depleted content in their Depleted products, provided they give attribution to your work and share profits with you. (If they don’t set up a separate agreement with you, this agreement covers your back and guarantees that you get a share of profits.)

So, how does revenue share work, then?

Once an individual work is certified as Canon or Apocrypha, the following things hold true:

If Viking Productions sells a product using your content, then 50% of the profits go to Viking and 50% is equally divided between the content creators used. (Viking goes to the work of creating the sellable item and taking it to the marketplace, so they take an equal share to the creators, since, essentially, you don’t have to do anything accept receive your royalty payments!)

Example 1a:
In this scenario, you are a photographer who has taken pictures of a bunch of abandoned buildings which have been Canonized. Viking Productions decides to create and sell a “Buildings of Depleted” Calendar. They choose 6 pictures from you and six pictures from Creator B. If the Calendar is sold for $20 and there is $5 profit, then Viking would take $2.50 (50%) and then the remaining 50% would be split between you and Creator B ($2.50/2 = $1.25 profit to you).

If you decide to create and sell a Depleted product using your approved content, you would pay Viking Productions 10% of the sales price as a royalty for selling your product in conjunction with their brand name. (Essentially, the World of Depleted content and name is something that the marketing team at Viking is always trying to improve, resulting in more people who want to explore this world and, consequently, support our content creators.)

Example 1b:
In this scenario, you are again a photographer who has taken pictures of a bunch of abandoned buildings which have been Canonized. You decide that you want to make a certified World of Depleted poster composed of all your own Canonized images called “A View To The End of the World: A Year In The Life of Depleted.” You sell it for $10 and would give us $1.

This covers the basics of how the agreement breaks things down.

In the future, we will expand to some of the more complex issues that can arise, but this gives you the bedrock of what these agreements are based on!

To watch videos about this, check out our FAQ Channel.

If you’re already sold and ready to become a contributor, just go to the World of Depleted Contributor Registration!

Leave a Reply