I get invited onto podcasts sometimes. I love doing them. What I don’t love is what sometimes arrives afterwards: a release form, assigning all rights in perpetuity, confirming no compensation, releasing the host from all liability. Standard stuff, in a boilerplate voice.
Not unreasonable. It just doesn’t match what happened. What happened was a conversation – often personal, sometimes about difficult things. Signing a “work made for hire” clause afterwards makes the whole thing feel transactional in a way it wasn’t.
So I’ve stopped. When I accept an invitation now, I add a line to my reply:
As a rule I don’t sign release forms – but please treat this email as my consent to record our conversation and use it however you need for the podcast and its promotion.
That gives the host what they actually need – a written record – before anyone reaches for a form. And it lets the consent live in the same register as the rest of the overall exchange, rather than arriving later dressed up as a contract.