Sublicense
The copyright holder may grant a third person the right to use his or her own work. The territory, duration, content, means of such use and other related issue may be decided in the agreement between the copyright holder and the licensee. For example, an author can grant a publisher the right to reprint his or her own work in a given quantity and to sell the reprinted book in a certain area within three years. This means the two parties can agree on terms they set up. If the licensee grants the rights obtained to a third party, this is called sublicensing. The two parties in a sublicensing agreement are the party that sublicenses and the third party, and the sublicensing terms must be within the rights obtained by the licensee. To put it in simple terms, sublicensing means the licensee grants in the role of the rights holder the rights that he or she has obtained to a third party. What is to be noted, however, is that the sublicensing model is not the normal in the Copyright Law cases. Therefore, if in a license the terms do not explicitly permit sublicensing, sublicensing is in legal terms seen as not allowed. Sublicensing is possible whether the rights are granted exclusively or non-exclusively. The difference is that in the latter case the licensee is required to have the copyright holder’s consent. In the case of exclusive licensing, the licensee assumes the legal role of licensor. If the agreement does not specify that no sublicensing is allowed, the licensee can decide on his or her own whether he or she wants to grant the rights to a third party. In terms of free software licenses, almost all licenses are non-exclusive ones. Some licenses, such as the MIT License, the MPL or the CPL, explicitly specify that the licensee may sublicense, so that the act of sublicensing does not require the consent of the author of the original work, thus giving users more flexibility in the use of a software program.