IANAL, this is not legal advice. If you want to do this by the books, get a lawyer. If you want to wing it, take the advice. This is my experience contractin

IANAL, this is not legal advice. If you want to do this by the books, get a lawyer. If you want to wing it, take the advice. This is my experience contracting for small to medium business and startups. YMMV, especially with large companies. Contracts mostly don't matter. Communication matters. Getting paid matters. Everything is negotiable. The wikipedia article on "work for hire" is informative. Read it. You (generally) have to specifically sign away rights to anything you create, so if you want to resell, you don't need permission, because you already own the copyright. But it will kill your reputation if you screw them. Take deposits. Get paid +10 days. Work your way into trusting them. Stop working once you get a certain amount of hours ahead of your last invoice, until the check arrives. For a new client, the amount of credit I will extend is about 5 hours. For an established client, I still try to keep it under 40-50 hours.