How to commission a story without taking the writer's copyright

Most commissioning contracts take the copyright by default. The template says work made for hire, the writer signs, and your outlet owns the piece outright and in perpetuity. It is the habit of the trade. It is also almost always more than you actually need, and it quietly costs you the thing that is hardest to buy: the goodwill of good writers.

Here is the useful reframe. Think about what publishing a story actually requires, and grant yourself exactly that.

What you actually need

To run a piece well, an outlet needs the right to publish it first, the confidence that a competitor is not running the same thing next week, and the ability to promote it. That is first publication, an exclusivity window, and normal promotional use. None of that requires owning the writer's copyright for the rest of time. It requires a license.

What a license looks like

A commissioned license is short and plain. First publication in your outlet. An exclusivity window of thirty, sixty, or ninety days, after which the writer may republish elsewhere with a credit back to you. A territory, usually worldwide. And the right to excerpt the piece to promote it. Everything beyond that stays with the person who did the work.

A byline is not ownership. On most assignments a writer signs both away at once. It does not have to work that way.

The part writers actually watch

Freelancers have gotten sharp about one clause in particular. Does the contract hand their work to a dataset to train a model, forever, for free? Under a license it does not. AI training and relicensing are a separate, optional, opt-in arrangement reserved to the writer unless they agree to it in writing. You do not need those rights to publish, so you do not take them. That single line is the difference between a pitch pile and a writer who brings you their best idea first.

Why it is the better deal for you

Stop taking the copyright you were never going to use, and you become the outlet writers want to work with. Better pitches arrive. The strong ones come back. And you look, correctly, like a place that treats the people it commissions as professionals rather than vendors. That reputation compounds, and it is free.

How Masthead does it

Every deal on Masthead settles this way without you having to draft anything. The writer signs a license, never an assignment and never work-for-hire. You get first publication and your exclusivity window. The writer keeps the copyright and one hundred percent of the settled price. You pay the settled price plus a 12% platform fee and a flat $1.49 processing fee, and the finished piece earns a permanent public record. We walked through the whole loop in how a brief becomes a byline, and the case against the default in the case against work-for-hire.

It costs you nothing to stop taking a copyright you do not use. It buys you the writers you actually want.