I’m currently doing work developing content on IP and entrepreneurship, and I’ve been working on some diagrams that I thought I’d share about the different types of licences that are out there, and place open content licensing in context.
To start with, a licence (or license depending on your US/UK perspective) is permission you give someone else to exercise rights that you control. They can be unwritten or written, though unwritten ones tend to not be worth the paper they’re printed on.
Licences differ from assignments, in that when assigning IP rights, such as copyright, you are giving the entire right to someone else, and retaining nothing. You could find yourself infringing the copyright for a work that you created, for example, if you’ve assigned the rights to another. Unless of course they’ve given you a licence to use the work.
In an exclusive licence, the rightsholder grants rights to a licensee AND gives up the right to the IP being licensed for themselves. The end result is that the licensor — the original owner — still owns the IP but has said that they won’t use the right licensed.
In a sole licence, the rightsholder gives only one other person (the licensee) rights over the IP, but is allowed to use the IP themselves. Unlike an exclusive licence, the owner can still use the IP rights (their own) being licensed.
A non-exclusive licence does exactly what it says on the tin — no one has exclusive rights under this licence. You can have multiple licensees, and the licensor has the rights to use the IP as well.
Open content licences, such as Creative Commons, fall into the category of non-exclusive licences. In this approach, you give a licence to the world. In the unported licence, this grant is in Section 3:
3. License Grant. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright) license to exercise the rights in the Work as stated below:
It then goes on to discuss all the different rights granted. Licences read a whole lot like contracts, because most of the time they are contracts as well as licences. However the contract/licence discussion is one for another post. Licences don’t however have to be stuffy and full of legalese. For an example of an informal approach, check out the Spoken Word End-User Licence Agreement.
