Licensing Agreement

A license lets others use your intellectual property while you retain ownership. A business’s trademarks, brands, inventions, and copyrights are among its most valuable assets. Through strategic trademark licensing arrangements, brand owners can not only increase brand awareness but also generate significant income. Licensing your brand, invention or creative intellectual property is crucial to submitting your product, services and brand name to the marketplace. Lehner Law LLC helps clients formulate, implement, and execute worldwide trademark and brand optimization and protection strategies. We assist trademark owners/licensors, as well as licensees, in structuring licensing arrangements to leverage their valuable trademarks and brands and secure their competitive advantage.

Some agreements are intricate, complex and require in-depth situational terms of usage, while others are simple blanket contracts that cover the basics of an intellectual property license.

The basic components that may be considered include, but are not limited to:

• Comprehensive Scope of the Agreement
• Territorial Restrictions
• Royalty Rates & Calculations
• Guarantees of Minimum Sales
• Time Schedules & Market Dates
• Total Length of Contract
• Various Renewal Options for Licensees
• Monitoring & Quality Control Rights
• Minimum Inventory Amounts
• Returns & Allowances
• Right for licensor to register IP and not let licensee register
• Payment as a a condition for the license
• Right to sublicense to others

An exclusive license may prevent the licensor from using their own work.

Copyright Licenses

Future technology is important to consider for copyright licenses. A broadly-written license will cover new forms that the work may take. For example, the right to publish ebooks and audiobooks may have inadvertently been granted by a broad license before those formats even existed.

In the 35th year of a copyright registration, an author or their surviving family may terminate a license or assignment. This termination right lets artist renegotiate royalties. This right does not apply to works made for hire nor derivative works.