Obtaining Film Adaptation Rights

I am a screenwriter who also has an

independent production company. I

want to obtain the rights to a book

and adapt it for the screen. The

author is deceased and the book is no

longer in publication. The publishing

company who originally published the

book is no longer in existence, or

rather was sold to another company.

I have no idea where to begin at this

point and any assistance would be

greatly appreciated!

Publishing royalties

Hello

I am being hired by a fitness video production company to create the soundtrack for a series of DVDs and possibly an infomercial. They are paying me a fixed fee for each of the 19 songs.

Today the person in charge of music licensing contacted me and I am not sure what to think of their proposal.

Here's part of her email: ''Basically, we ask for limited usage rights for the songs to be used in our workouts as well as the option to use them in an accompanying infomercial - should the producer of that show request some of your songs to be included. If one of your songs are selected for infomercial usage, your composer royalty payments would be paid directly to you via ASCAP or BMI quarterly. We ask all of our composers and music libraries to assign us the publishing royalties for infomercial -- which I'd like to discuss with you.''

Is it the normal procedure that the film company retains all publishing royalties for the soundtrack? Is this a fair proposal?

Thanks in advance for your advice.

Marcos

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I have been concerned about this matter for quite some time but never really got around to addressing it. Finally, when considering about uploading it to a popular musician website, I decided to pose these questions. I want to feel assured that the music I made is truly mine (even though, physically it really is) and how I can prove it.

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