Post #81304 by pshikli on Wed, Mar 17, 2004 7:40 AM

Lots of questions about artistic rights. Here's what it comes down to. If we spend thousands of dollars marketing a design and start ordering tikis 32 at a time, we'd like good answers to the following 2 questions:

1.) How do we insure that we do not face the artist or another distributor as a competitor for the design we promoted?

2.) If the artist becomes unable or unwilling to continue production, what are our options?

The issue of artistic rights are negotiable, but in our shoes, you would need good answers to these two questions.

All artists who present designs from any material to MegaChess get the same two questions. They just don't get paid a contest prize for their designs.

What we're looking for takes under an hour or so with a sketch pad. If it takes longer, the design is probably too intricate to be relevant for us.

If the contest idea fails, we may look into contracting a tiki artist individually. But then the idea of making this search open to anyone in the tiki community also fails.

Don't forget that you can design and build a large tiki chess set on your own. Once your marketing succeeds and our customers ask for it, we'll consider adding it to our product line. That way, you keep all artistic rights, along with the initial costs and risk.

Peter/MegaChess

On 2004-03-10 15:11, pshikli wrote:
I checked with Hanford Lemoore, and he said this would be an interesting post.

I dug around the forums looking for a large tiki-style chess set. I own http://www.MegaChess.com and would like to add such a line to our offerings. So I had an idea.

We are hereby posting a design contest. $200 for first prize, $100 for second, $50 for third.

I'm thinking Tiki poles where the king is about 4-feet tall. We have design guidelines for artisans at http://www.megachess.com/spec48.htm, though I expect significant changes to keep to what makes tikis special. Use the design guidelines just to understand what makes each piece unique, and then map that to tikis, or your style of tikis.

Simple is better than intricate. A strong statement with a few cuts is better than lots of details that don't weather well anyway. Also consider the cost of production. The design has to be affordable (remember: a chess set has 32 tikis).

The contest ends on April 10, 2004. At that time, we will post all the designs. Don't submit a design if you don't want it posted. For the winners, we will be buying the designs for the prize money. And then I would talk to the winners about having them (or whomever they recommend) produce the Tiki chess sets under contract to us.

You can post designs and ideas until then, but remember that others will see your postings.

To apply, simply email your contact info to "Peter Shikli", along with your designs as attachments.

I'll check this regularly for questions.

[ Edited by: pshikli on 2004-03-17 08:16 ]

[ Edited by: pshikli on 2004-03-17 08:18 ]