Who Owns Your Molds? How Overseas Factories Hold Tooling Hostage, and How to Stop Them
This lesson is an essay published by Harris Sliwoski.
Read the essayWhat you'll get
Dan Harris, a lawyer at a firm that drafts China manufacturing contracts and sells that work, explains why paying a mold invoice does not settle who owns the tooling, the design files or the rights behind them, and how factories use unpaid engineering fees, subcontracted mold shops and silence to keep control. It centers on China, but its list of what a tooling agreement should cover and its four questions to answer in writing before you pay a tooling deposit work for any factory that will hold your tools.
Do this week
Before you pay for any tooling, write down who will design it, who will hold the editable design files, who owns the changes the factory suggests and what happens to the tools if you leave, and get each answer into the contract.