Resale, Master Resell, & Private Label Rights - What's the Difference?

by TheNightOwl

Resale rights, master resell rights (MRR) and Private Label Rights (PLR) products can be an easy way to earn money today, for sure. But they can also be a potential legal liability if you don't know the difference between them.

This article will, hopefully, show you how to use resellable ebooks and software to earn money online while still protecting yourself and making sure you are not in breach of your reseller license.

Please note: Public domain e-books will not be considered in this article. That is an entirely different kettle of fish to e-books you can sell using resell rights.

There are, as far as I have seen to date, six main categories of "Rights" (in increasing order of flexibility):

  1. personal rights
  2. give-away rights
  3. resale rights
  4. master resell rights
  5. personal private label rights
  6. private label rights

Let's take a look at them in turn and clarify the differences. That way, you can be as safe as possible when trying to make some extra money online being an ebook reseller.

1. Personal Rights

These rights are the most basic and the most straight-forward in the majority of cases: You purchase or obtain an ebook or piece of software for your own personal use. You may not give it away or resell it any way.

In the overwhelming majority of cases you are not allowed to post it on your site as content—doing so is almost certainly a breach of international copyright laws. Don't do it.

There is an enormous difference between Personal Rights (#1) and Personal Private Label Rights (#5). Don't confuse them.

Basically, in most cases, Personal Rights means you have NO rights to that content. You can read it, listen to it, use the software, etc. and learn from it, but you cannot use that content as your own in any way.

2. Give-Away Rights

This kind of license for ebooks, short reports, software, etc. is pretty standard in the internet marketing niche. You can quite often download ebooks for free because they are usually affiliate marketing ebooks or items of software, meaning the author has written a useful report or put together a useful piece of software that other people will want. And in the course of the report, or at the end, or somewhere in the software, there are links to affiliate programs.

These links to various affiliate products earn the author commissions if someone buys and in return you have something that you can (depending on the license terms) offer to your list as an opt-in, or post on your blog, or include as part of an ebook bundle, for example.

Note: Make sure you read the exact terms/license because it's each individual author who decides what you can and can't do with a give- away product.

3. Resale Rights

People looking for products to sell online often search out e books for resale. This is because there is no inventory clogging up your garage like, say, an eBay seller or reseller.

Quite a lot of internet marketing ebooks are written with resale rights. This allows the purchaser to offer it for sale online to other potential buyers.

Resell rights products (including resell rights software) can be a way to earn quick money.

The thing that is particularly attractive about ebooks with resale rights is that they help you to earn money online while giving you useful tips and information about the other 5 million things you need to know about generating online income.

It's quite easy to make money with resale rights depending on which niche market you are planning to enter. The only problem is that most resale rights products are, in my opinion, complete garbage.

They are usually just rehashed PLR (see below) with a ton of affiliate links in them. On the whole, I tend to stay away from this type of rights, especially those with free resale rights.

The only conditions that are generally placed on resale e books is that you cannot edit, modify, add to, or take from the product, and you cannot pass on the right to resell that same item to your customers.

For example, let's say that you purchase some ebook packages and inside there is some software and ebooks with resale rights.

You set up a business ebooks or cheap ebooks website to earn money from home. People come along and purchase ebooks from your site.

You cannot transfer the right to resell these books and software. You have the right to resell it, but your customers do not.

To do so would require the next category...

4. Master Resell Rights

This is just like the previous one insofar as you cannot alter or edit the product in any way. The difference is that when you sell the product, you can also transfer the right to resell the same item to your customers.

Sometimes this MRR license is clearly stated inside the product itself, so that everyone who purchases a copy immediately has Master Resell Rights. Other times, it is up to the seller to decide whether or not to pass on MRR to his or her customers.

Some people argue that reselling ebooks with the same rights means that you are creating competition for yourself in the market.

However, there are ebooks for sale everywhere online and you are likely to make more sales (i.e. earn more money!) with master resale rights ebooks because the buyer knows that he or she can turn around and immediately resell that item.

And frankly, the chances of you having gotten in front of the same traffic source is so slim that it's not really competition. The internet is just too big.

Again, you need to be selective with Master Resell Rights products. You'd expect higher quality than just Resale Rights products, but sadly this is not always the case.

Also, sometimes there are just sooo many affiliate links in products with master resale rights that they're just impossible to resell in good conscience. It's not that I begrudge the original author the right to put in his or her affiliate links; if the content is top-notch, that's fine. Rather, it's the number of them.

On a free report, what do you expect? On Resale Rights, I can groove to a reasonable (not ridiculous) number. But on master resell rights ebooks that I've paid good money for I expect higher quality. Buyer beware.

Click to read Part 2 of Resale, Master Resell and Private Label Rights...




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