The case against work-for-hire

Every freelance writer has signed a contract they did not read all the way down. The clause is usually near the bottom, under a heading like "work made for hire." Sign it and the piece you are about to report, write, and stand behind stops being yours the moment you file it. The outlet owns it outright. You keep the byline and nothing else.

This gets presented as the normal cost of the assignment. It is not normal. It is a transfer of property, and it is the one term in the deal that almost never gets negotiated, mostly because a lot of writers do not know it is on the table.

What copyright actually is

Copyright is the right to make the next copy. The reprint. The anthology. The translation. The film option, the newsletter excerpt, the course somebody builds around your reporting three years from now. Every future use of the work lives in that one word.

Work-for-hire hands all of it to the buyer for the same flat fee they paid for first publication. You are not selling a story on those terms. You are selling every story that story could ever become.

Work-for-hire is not a price. It is a giveaway attached to a price.

The alternative is older than the internet

It is a license. The buyer pays for the right to publish. The writer keeps the copyright. This is how photographers have worked for a century. It is how musicians and novelists work. It is only in the day-rate corners of journalism that total assignment became the house default, and it became the default because it was easier for whoever drafted the contract, not because it was fair to the person who did the reporting.

What we built instead

On Masthead there is no work-for-hire. There is no box for it in the rights menu, because we did not build one. Every transaction is a license. The writer keeps the copyright on every sale and takes the full settled price. The platform fee sits on the buyer side. Reprints, syndication, and the option that surfaces two years later all stay with the person who wrote the piece.

That is the whole idea. A writer should be able to sell a piece without selling their future. We think the market clears fine on those terms. We are building the place to prove it.