Quote Originally Posted by Evil_DM View Post
Okay. Is that because I may be making money from them in the future? Is there a way to get around this? So that IF I make products that will make money, THEN I will pay more? And no, I am not looking for a freebee, just looking for spending the initial budget I have as efficiently as possible.
To get around this, you can request those maps and pay just for them, but the copyright stays with the artist. That means you can use them just for personal purposes (like display poster map on your wall, or use map for a game with friends). If you want to upload map somewhere for public, make changes, distribute, reproduce, then you will need to license it - which is most common i guess. You can ask for a license to put this map in a particular book which you sell later, but that is about it. If you would like later to promote something using this map, make any changes, basicly anything more than using it in mentioned book, you either need to pay to licence more rights or ultimately buy a full copyright, which means that creator can not do anything with the art anymore. All the rights are transferred to you, you can do with it what you like. This is the most expensive.

So with your current budget, you can ask to make those maps for you without any licensing. You will have to keep them in the closet untill you are ready to pay more either to licence the work for specific purpose, or buy full copyright. This depends on the creator-customer negotiations. There are people who dont want to sell all rights at all.