Why Licenses Can Look Different
If you’re new to this side of online commerce, you’ve probably noticed that the PLR rights or licensing can vary pretty significantly both in layout and contents. Two products can sit side by side in a store at nearly the same price and come with very different rules. One lets you hand the content out to your email list, while another insists it be sold for a minimum price and never given away.
Why does this happen? These products can pass through a lot of hands. A creator writes the original and decides what buyers may do with it, and resellers like us then pass it along. Sometimes we summarize the terms in our own words, and sometimes we keep the creator’s wording exactly as it was written, which means the phrasing and the level of detail change from one product to the next.
If you’ve ever wondered, “Can I edit and resell PLR?”, or “What exactly can I do with these PLR products?” you’re in the right place. We get a lot of questions about this, so we decided to put the basics in one place. Below, we walk through roughly what PLR and MRR each mean, how to read a license line by line, and where the common sticking points tend to be, including the difference between owning a product and holding its copyright.
PLR and MRR, and Where They Split
Private label rights, usually shortened to PLR, generally let you take a product and make it your own. You can rewrite the text, rework the layout, swap in your branding, and sell or use the result under your name, as long as the license for that specific product allows each of those things. Master resell rights, or MRR, cover something a little different. You’re allowed to resell the product, and often to pass those resale rights along to your own customers, but the content itself usually has to stay exactly as it was written.
In our experience the two overlap more than people expect. Permissions like reselling, bundling, and adding a product to a paid membership tend to look much the same across both. Editing is where they part ways. With an MRR product, you should assume the contents can’t be changed unless the license clearly says they can. One of the MRR licenses we pass along puts it plainly: the product includes master resell rights only, and private label rights are not part of the deal.
Reselling with PLR and MRR rights themselves can also vary. While you, the purchaser, may be able to edit and rebrand to your heart’s content, some licenses don’t allow you to then resell the product with the included rights, but instead as personal use only. We’ll get into that a bit more later.
So, which one fits you? If you want to rebrand and reshape what you sell, look for PLR. If you’d rather sell something finished as it stands, MRR usually does the job, and it can be a good fit when you don’t have the time to rework a product from scratch.
Confused or need more information? Our Beginner’s Guide to PLR and MRR is more thorough and includes more common questions about this sort of business and product.
Examples: Common Terms at a Glance
Bear in mind, these can vary license to license and product to product. Always be sure to check the license details in the product descriptions for specifics or reach out to us with any additional questions if it’s not covered there. But these examples are typically what you’ll find.
PLR (Private Label Rights)
Generally, PLR allows editing and modification of the material to match your business and branding. Editing and modification very often includes translation into other languages as well, unless the license specifies otherwise.
- [YES] Edit and modify the content to fit your business and branding
- [YES] Translate the content into other languages (very often included, unless specified otherwise)
MRR (Master Resell Rights)
MRR can be a little more strict. It usually doesn’t allow editing or modification of the original material, but it still provides resale rights.
- [YES] Resell the product
- [NO] Edit or modify the original material
RR (Resell Rights)
RR is often the most restrictive for resellers, since it only allows you to resell the product to end-users.
- [YES] Resell the product to end-users
- [NO] Pass resale rights on to your customers
Personal Use
Personal Use doesn’t come with any resale rights, and the product can only be used personally.
- [YES] Use the product for yourself
- [NO] Resell the product in any form
Personal use is typically what business owners will do with a product. As an example – a fitness instructor might pick up the “25 Weight Loss Habits That Actually Work” ebook and tracker, and use it with their clients. They’re not looking to resell it themselves, but to use it personally for their business. Many resellers out there specifically pick up PLR and MRR products to sell without any additional resell rights to more targeted audiences within a specific niche. This is very common, and what many will do with these products.
How to Read Licensing Sections
Most of the rights blocks in our store come in one of two styles. The first is a checklist, where every permission gets a [YES] or a [NO] in front of it. We typically write those ourselves, and they’re the quickest to scan, since you can tell at a glance whether you can edit the content, compile it into an ebook, or offer private label rights to your own customers. The second style is a paragraph or bullet points, usually taken from the creator we bought the product from and passed along as written. Those read more like instructions, with lines such as “you may add this product to your PAID membership site” sitting right next to the things you may not do.
Whichever style you’re looking at, we’d suggest reading the [NO] items first. They mark the boundaries, and there are usually fewer of them than permissions. Then go back through the [YES] items hunting for small qualifiers, because that’s where surprises tend to hide. A license might let you give the product to subscribers or members as a bonus, but exclude source files. Another might allow submitting content to article directories with a note to alter it first. Words like “only,” “must,” “minimum,” and “first” are worth slowing down and being careful with.
A rights block can also say nothing about the thing you care about most. When that happens, ask us before you buy. A short question now is much easier to sort out than a guess you discover was wrong after you’ve purchased it from us or listed it for sale yourself.
Ownership Versus Copyright
This is the question we hear most often, and the two words sound close enough that it’s easy to see why. What does “claim ownership” actually let you do? In PLR terms, it means you can treat the product as yours to run. Put your name and brand on it, change it where the license allows, set your own price, and promote it as your own offering. Many of our rights blocks list this as a [YES].
Copyright is a separate matter. It’s the legal right held by the person who created the original work, and it’s what lets them control who copies it. A PLR license hands you permission to use and sell the content in specific ways, but it doesn’t provide a copyright or any copyrighting ability, which is why our own checklist pairs a [YES] for claiming ownership with a [NO] for claiming copyright. You can brand a planner as your product and advertise it under your own business name, yet you can’t present yourself as a legal copyright holder of the original material.
There’s a practical reason this line matters. A PLR product can be sold to many buyers, each holding the same license. If every one of them claimed copyright, they’d be asserting exclusive rights against each other over the same content, and that would undo the whole point of PLR and MRR. It also means you shouldn’t register the unedited content as your own work or send takedown notices to someone else who holds the same license.
There’s good news on the other side, too. Pages you write yourself, designs you create, and original material you add on top of the base product are generally your own work, so you can usually protect those additions even though the underlying content stays under the original license. Rules vary by country, so if protecting your additions matters to your business, it’s worth checking with someone qualified in your area.
Giving a Product Away
Giveaways cause more confusion than almost any other permission, mostly because licenses treat them so differently. Some of our products allow you to give the content away, and others flatly don’t. A common middle ground is lead generation, where you may compile the content into a giveaway report or ebook to build your email list, but you can’t hand out the product itself to anyone who asks. You might see a block that lists compiling a giveaway report as a [YES] and giving the product away as a [NO] in the same breath, and that’s not a contradiction.
Creator-supplied licenses add more variety. Some allow giving the product to subscribers, members, or customers as a bonus. Others permit a giveaway only when someone buys through your affiliate link, and some require the product to be sold at a set minimum price with no free distribution at all. Paid membership sites are often fine while free ones are not, which is a distinction worth checking before you add anything to a membership.
Why are the rules so careful? Free distribution lowers the value of the product for everyone else who holds a license, so creators tend to draw a firm line between using content to build a list and passing the product around for nothing. If a license doesn’t say which side your plan falls on, feel free to send us the question via our Support button in the bottom right, and we’ll help you find the answer.
Price Minimums, Membership Sites, and Passing Rights Along
Some licenses set a floor on what you can charge. We’ve seen minimums of $7 for an ebook, with a higher figure of $17 for a video product from the same creator, so it’s worth checking whether the number applies to the whole package or to individual pieces. If a product you plan to bundle carries a minimum, ask whether the bundle price still satisfies it before you set your own.
Passing rights to your customers is a separate permission, and licenses handle it in different ways. One of our MRR examples says you can pass on the resell rights privilege and sell master resale rights, while its [NO] list specifies that you cannot resell as PLR. Those two lines fit together once you notice that the first is about selling rights that are at or below its level, while the other would often come with additional rights buyers would expect, like editing.
Memberships work the same way. Adding a product to a paid membership or including it as a bonus inside a larger package can be commonly allowed, while placing it on a free membership site usually isn’t. Selling it on its own and passing it to a membership are two different uses, and a license can say yes to one and no to the other.
Third Party Elements
A product’s rights block covers the product’s own content. It doesn’t automatically cover everything that was used to build it. Planners and templates these days often include Canva, which includes their elements, fonts, stock photos, or mockup scenes, and each of those comes with its own terms from whoever supplies it. A license that lets you resell a flattened PDF doesn’t settle whether you can resell the graphics inside it, and a Canva element that’s fine in a personal project may carry different conditions once it’s part of something you sell.
We can’t speak for Canva or any other provider, and their terms change over time, so we’d point you to their current license pages for the definitive answer. Plenty of licenses also treat a flattened PDF export differently from the editable template behind it, so if you plan to sell one form but not the other, check that the rights block draws that distinction clearly. And when you’re not sure whether an element is covered, replacing it with a graphic you’ve created or properly licensed yourself is a safe way to avoid the question altogether.
Before You Buy
The best habit we can suggest is to read the rights block on the product page before you add anything to your cart. Look at the [NO] items, check the qualifiers on the [YES] items, and ask yourself whether your plan fits inside them. Can you edit the content, sell it under your own brand, and offer it the way you intend to? If the answer to any of those is unclear, send us a message. We’d much rather answer a question up front than have you guess.
We supply a file of the product’s rights in every product we sell, so that it’s always available to double check and/or pass on if that’s your intention. Keep in mind that this post is general guidance about how these licenses tend to work. The license on each product page is the one that applies to that product, and none of this is legal advice. For anything with real stakes attached, a qualified professional in your area is the right person to ask.