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A Game Developer's Bill of Rights
Gamasutra has another piece from the always interesting Eric Zimmerman, where he offers up A Game Developer's Bill of Rights. From the article: "A Game Developers' Bill of Rights is part of this ongoing discussion, a provocation that draws attention to a set of important issues and challenges facing our industry. It highlights some of the problems that developers face as they try to create games and grow our industry, both creatively and commercially ... A Game Developers' Bill of Rights is not meant to be a strictly practical document. I did not write it as a guide for contract negotiation, nor as a set of legal standards for developer/publisher agreements. But I do believe that the positions represented by the articles in the Bill of Rights are absolutely the correct and proper ethical positions to take."
From the article: "To quote Greg Costikyan from an argument he was having with a game publisher at a conference reception a few years ago, a developer should retain the rights to a game "because they fucking should, that's why." This kind of laziness in a debate risks completely discrediting the entire concept. The default position from which this debate begins is: Developers are competing with each other to attract millions of dollars in advances from a publisher. If one developer wants to retain rights and another is willing to surrender them, the publisher may well prefer the latter bid. You may not like that argument, but speaking in short sentences containing F-words does not cause it to magically vanish. (And I speak as a supporter of Greg Costikyan's ideas about the industry.)