
Product Rights - Wisdom and Foolishness
It used to be that everyone had the same "general" idea what given rights were.
For example "Resale/Resell Rights" (commonly RR) meant you could sell the product to someone else. Usually in information, it meant you could reproduce and sell the product as much as you wanted. Some people tried to restrict the right to sell below a certain price point.
Master Resell Rights (MRR) meant not only could you sell the product and make as many copies as you wanted, but you could pass on the right to resell, or even the rights to Master Resell... Here's a spot where some of you may recall seeing some sticky issues arising. If one MRR said you could pass on Master Resell Rights, but one didn't, you were obligated to abide by the rights under which you obtained the product. Which meant reading the license, which often times was written by someone who didn't know what they were doing, or who didn't bother to provide the license.
Rebrand Rights (abbreviation anyone?) meant you could change the affiliate links or whichever specified advertisements in the product with your own (or someone else's if you wanted)
Private Label Rights (PLR) possibly one of the most convoluted rights out there. Depending how the license was written, you could rewrite, rebrand, label as your own product, etc.
Eventually, to help clarify things, people started adding a list of examples of what you could or couldn't do with the product. This summary developed into a table of [YES] You may do abcdefg... and [NO] You can't do vwxyz.
Years ago there was a lot of talk about how many people were starting to just include their summary box and no license terms.
A summary box would be VERY difficult to hold up in a courtroom, and doesn't even define what jurisdiction would apply in a dispute. In many cases it gets looked at as a "you shouldn't do vs. you should do" not a "you can't do vs you can do"
To take, for example several products I've seen, which have the same "PLR rights"
Your Private Label Rights: [Yes] Can be sold [Yes] Can be converted to any format [Yes] Can be edited [Yes] Can be offered as a bonus [Yes] Can be included in "paid" membership sites [Yes] Can be combined with other offers. [Yes] Can be turned into a DVD [Yes] Can claim yourself as the author or producer of the audio. [Yes] Can sell on eBay.com. [Yes] Can pass Private Label Rights [Yes] Can be used as free web content [Yes] Can be given away free [Yes] Can be uploaded to YouTube or other video hosting sites. [Yes] Can Pass Resale Rights [Yes] Can Pass Master Resale Rights [Yes] Can pass the source code files along to customers. [No] Can be sold as a WSO. [No] Can offer as a bonus to a WSO, or resell on the Warrior Forum as a Classified |
It doesn't say whether or not your giving away resale, master resale, PL Rights requires any payment, so one person could argue that by these terms the first person to buy the rights can (keeping with what IS said above) they can take the entire video course, as is, claim it's their own personally created product, and GIVE AWAY all the same rights for no charge, for free.
And getting an answer of 'yes' from a license holder, who never got a yes to that question from the original licensor (i.e. actual creator) may be giving a right to you that the original owner never gave to the PLR buyer who sold it to you.
And btw- there is nothing that dictates on the sales page, or worse yet on the first reseller's page that requires the buyer to acknowledge the rights they do or do not have.
Similarly, other packages include the following as their entire license agreement.
[Yes] You can sell it [Yes] You can convert to other formats [Yes] You can edit it [Yes] Can claim yourself as the author/creator. [Yes] Can pass Private Label Rights or lesser Rights [Yes] Can be uploaded to YouTube. [Yes] Can pass the source code files along to customers. [No] Cannot be given away free [No] Cannot be added to free membership sites [No] Cannot be used as content on free sites [No] Can offer as a bonus to a WSO, or resell on the Warrior Forum as a Classified |
Isn't uploading to YouTube a means of GIVING IT AWAY?
If I CAN upload it to YouTube, but I can't give it away, what about a YouTube clone?
My personal favorite:
You have PLR rights to this package |
I know we can't settle this, but for all the product creators who read this. PLEASE put more to your rights than a checklist of yes and no. The summary started off as an answer to the frequent questions of "Well, can I do this?" These were never meant to be a 'quick way' to define the entire license agreement.
- = Signature on Vacation = -
(We all need a break from what we do for a living. I thought it was time my signature got a break too)