Forum Moderators: not2easy
I'd guess your friends should only sign the deal where they retain the copyright, although the media involved may want the copyright assigned to them. Assigning copyright to someone else is not all bad as it can often be lucrative.
As far as prices are concerned, that's a tough one. It depends on too many factors to say it'll be x per minute. Your friends will know the cost of research and production so it's a case of looking at the profit margin they'd hope to achieve.
It might help their cause if your friends state that they will be flexible and won't make this guy's life harder than it already is. They should, of course, get some money for the other media approaches -- I'm just suggesting they should be clear they won't be control-freak creative prima donas.
Obviously the more freedom the publisher has to use the property for publishing, marketing etc, the more they will pay! But the key is to be aware of the real value of the work by looking at the various ways it can be exploited. Publishers make a lot of money off artists/writers/creative people, but that's because they know how to commercialise it and have the right contacts and distribution networks, which creative people generally do not have. So sometimes "outsourcing" some of your work to others is a great synergy, as long as you know exactly the kind of considerations i summarised above.
As an example, as a web publisher we have a standard contract with columists and authors which covers everthing from copyright, permissions and rights in web and other media, ownership of graphics, rights to modify or create derivative works (eg to summarise in RSS news feeds), timelines, and even revenue sharing and how/when it is paid.
