11 July 2010

The Peculiar World of Private Label Rights

Here's a variety of "sharing" I'd not come across before: private label rights. This is what Wikipedia has to say on the subject:

Private label rights is a concept similar to reselling, but the merchant is permitted to modify the product to fit his or her needs. Typical PLR products are articles, reports, eBooks, and autoresponders. This kind of content is used for the purpose of allowing multiple buyers to invest in the content with free rein to alter and use it by claiming authorship of it. It is typically used in online affiliate marketing systems.

As far as I can make out, this is a kind of a cross between spamblog content and pyramid selling.

One question that comes to mind is how much CC-licensed stuff ends up being passed around in this way? Of course, if the licence allows it, that's fine, but I wondered whether anyone had any experience of their content being "repackaged" in this way?

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2 comments:

  1. Hopefully I'm pointing out the obvious, but to falsely claim authorship of something is plagiarism, fraudulent, dishonest, deceitful, etc.

    However, that doesn't prevent the sale and use of 'white-label content' in contexts where its authorship need not be claimed, e.g. in contexts where authorship is implicitly 'an unidentified employee or freelancer'.

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  2. @Crosbie: yes, the devil is in the details.

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