copyright intellectual-property licensing creative-commons
Private license within copyleft
<p>Within a copyleft license is it possible to have a clause that would grant exclusive rights (=private license) for the same content to a company?</p>

<p>I mean something liky CC-BY-SA plus "company X is being given license to do ...". Is it possible to incorporate this into a single license? Or is it better to incorporate the license for the company within terms of service?</p>

<p>I want to cover that the company will also have "private license" to the derivatives of the content.</p>

<p>EDIT: Learned abozt what "exclusive" rights are and I do not want that. Otherwise the question remains the same.</p>

<h2>Think about what a licence is ...</h2>
<p>A licence is a contract which basically says “I, the copyright holder, won’t sue you for copyright breach if ...”. The conditions after the “If” can be anything you like.</p>
<p>Clearly, you can give away as many licences on the same or different terms to any number of people. Some people may be covered by more than one licence but so long as they comply with the terms of <em>any</em> licence they are immune from your wrath.</p>
<p>However, <em>you</em> can only give away <strong>exclusive</strong> rights once - that’s what exclusive means. So for your particular question:</p>
<ul>
<li>no, you can’t give one person exclusive rights and then give <em>anyone</em> else <em>any</em> rights.</li>
<li>it doesn’t matter if different licences refer to each other or not.</li>
</ul>
