Friday, November 30, 2012

Licensing Your Work


There are many different ways that you as a copyright holder can let others use your intellectual property, but perhaps the way that affords you the most freedom is to license your work. With a license, you are able to grant others permission to use your work, but you retain exclusive rights over how they may use that work.

Why should you be concerned with how someone uses your work? This is an important aspect of licensing, one that protects both your work and your reputation, and it leaves you with greater control than, for instance, a Creative Commons license. With a Creative Commons license, anyone may use your work in any way that you specify. However, with a Licensing Agreement Form, you call all the shots. You allow specific people specific rights. Consider this scenario: You write a fantastic song, but someone records a terrible version of it. After your work has been botched so badly, who is going to want to hire you to write another one? Another scenario: You've created a documentary, which you feel is effective as a whole, and you give someone permission to show it. However, you later find out that the person showing your documentary has taken excerpts of it out of context, skewing the message you intended to convey.

When you license your work, you specify exactly what can and cannot be done with it. You can license a recording to be used in a movie, but not in the promotional material for the movie. You can license your software so that other companies can use it, but you can limit the use, amount of users, and even the time frame.

It's your work. When you license your work, you can be sure that you retain complete control, not only over who is allowed to use your work, but how that work is presented to the world.

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