As a copyright owner, it is for you to decide whether
and how to license use of your work. A
licence is simply a contractual
agreement between the copyright owner and user. Like any
licence, it can be as simple as a short statement signed on a piece of paper or as complex a legal
document as you please!
Your licence may be as narrow or as broad in scope as
you wish and so can be limited in time or
any other way.
You may grant an exclusive licence, but remember that
this enables the licensee to use the
copyright work to the exclusion of all others, including you. Accordingly, you may prefer to grant
non-exclusive licenses enabling you to grant the same rights to others and to continue to use the
copyright work yourself.
Note that sometimes people may be able to argue that a
copyright work is subject to an implied
licence even when there has been no agreement about a licence. For further information on implied
licences, see below.
In some situations, copyright owners find it difficult
to license use of their works by themselves and
so several collecting societies (also known as collective licensing bodies) have been formed for the
collective licensing of copyright material.
