How do you make money with Private Label Rights?

[ram89410]

I have been seeing a lot of tweets on Twitter about PLR and using it to make money. Could this be some kind of a scam? It's my understanding that sometimes books will lose their copyright after so many years and they become PLR. Just curios!

[Kittysue]

If you could make money this way don't you think every major publisher would be doing it?

[Techwing]

Private label rights has no precise definition, but usually it refers to a type of license for copyrighted material that allows the material to be "re-branded" under someone else's name for further use. For example, a photo could be licensed by its creator in such a way that the buyer of the license would be allowed to call the photo his own (even though it's not really his own). The creator retains the copyright, but the license he grants is very liberal.

This type of licensing allows people and organizations to assemble content made by someone else and re-brand the collection as their own work. The big disadvantage to this is that the same material may also be licensed in the same way to someone else. So if you build an "exclusive" collection of photos with this type of licensing, you might find that your competitor has done exactly the same thing.

It's just a way to license content protected by copyright, like many other licensing schemes. It doesn't necessarily generate any more money (for the copyright holder) than any other licensing scheme. For the licensee (user) of the content, it doesn't make any money, but it might allow money to be saved.

Private label rights have nothing to do with loss of copyright or public domain. All copyrights expire eventually (in most countries), typically 70 years after the death of the person who created the copyrighted work. When the copyright expires, the work passes into the public domain and anyone can use it for any purpose—this is true of famous paintings from the 1700s, for example. A creator of an artistic work can also release it to the public domain before the copyright expires, in most countries, but few artists do that, because copyright is what allows them to earn a living.