Thought it might be informative to hear how different people decide the price of a custom built puppet.
If someone sends you a drawing, picture, or a few sentence description, how do you decide what to charge?

Obviously a picture or sketch requires less time than trying to take the words and turn them into a sketch.
I know some people use a formula (cost of materials plus estimated time and multiply it by ___) to decide on the cost.  Others don't use a formula at all.

How do you do it?

One more question, how can you be sure the puppet they send you a picture of is not someones copyrighted design? I know you can change features, etc., but what if you don't know?  We have visited the copyright issue before, and it tends to be muddy at best.  I am not sure if any cases have gone to court and what the outcome was. It seems to me the "change it by x amount" idea is pretty subjective.

I very seldom do custom work as you have described it so I am not really the one to give advice on that but normally would give an estimate on what it would cost plus labor for the type of puppet they where looking for with along with the understanding that materials could raise the price. For example if they needed a unique or custom fabric for the puppet it may cost more. One I can remember is a vulture body character whose suite was a very specific long nape fur. This fur was actually custom milled and dyed to the specifications needed.  The company that wanted this actually had the fur made for them and sent us enough to make the character because they where going to use the rest of the run at a latter date.

I regards to copyright and if the character is already copyrighted you just have to play it by ear. If it is an actual photo of an existing puppet then you need to confirm that they hold the copyright. I do always state that I will not create copyrighted material unless they hold the copyright. This extends to say a cartoon character or mascot that someone may be wanting made. In fact that is often a common request since they may have already established the character in other formats but now want it brought to life as a puppet.  Legally I don't think there is much that someone is going to be able to do are do to the person who builds something for someone else. They are going to go after the people who are using it instead and nine times out of ten the legal outcome would be that they would have to stop using it.

Just do your best in trying to determine if something is copyrighted. In the US it is pretty easy to spot things since you are more likely to be aware of what is out there. If it is another country that can be more difficult but remember this if it is copyrighted there is going to be something about it out there on the internet as a rule. Google the name of the character and see what comes up. If there is not name supplied then use a short description of the character with perhaps the country and see what comes up.

Tineye.com

It allows you to input an image from your computer or a link from another website; then it does a search for the same image on the internet. It's free to use.

Very handy for checking images, although obviously not 100% perfect for catching copyright issues.

Just thought of something else you could do: if the person offers an image (with taken with a photo, drawn or done on computer) you could ask them to sign a liability form. That is, something that says "you agree that you own the copyrights of the image, or have obtained permission to use said image; and any infringement of copyrights and resulting liabilities are the responsibility of the client".. (IANAL)

That way if something does happen, you're at least protected.

Thanks Na, the liability statement is a good thing, and one I had not thought of.

I think as much as possible a written contract should exist with clients; it prevents so many problems later down the track. Plenty of other designers/artists do this, why not us?

Anyway, take with a grain of salt, since I'm not a lawyer. But I'm sure there's some US organisation with a website that could offer good info about contracts/liabilities.