As already discussed, the exclusive rights of copyright automatically belong to the creator of a work as soon as that work is captured in a fixed form. The creator then owns these rights for the full term of copyright. However, if they choose, they can grant rights to another person or entity (e.g., a publisher) in one of several ways:

• Transfer of Copyright: Many publishers require authors to transfer some or all of their exclusive rights to the publisher. After transfer, the publisher owns these rights, and the author can no longer exercise them without the publisher’s permission. You might sometimes hear copyright transfer referred to as “copyright assignment” or even “signing over copyright.”
   
• Licenses: Publishers don’t actually need a copyright transfer in order to publish a work. Another way to give publishers the necessary rights is to grant them a license to do certain things with the work, such as copy and distribute the work. A license can be either exclusive (i.e., only the grantee can exercise the licensed rights) or nonexclusive (i.e., the author can continue to exercise those rights, and can nonexclusively license those rights to additional parties as well).
   
• Creative Commons Licenses: While most licenses are granted to individual people or entities, it is also possible to grant a license to everyone in the world. In scholarly publishing and academia, this is most commonly achieved by applying a Creative Commons (CC) license to a work. CC licenses are pre-written licenses that provide copyright holders with an easy, cost-free way to provide the public with more rights than they’d ordinarily have. There are six different CC licenses: The most permissive is the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY), which allows anyone to copy, distribute, adapt, or remix the work, provided they attribute the creator, while the most restrictive is the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license (CC BY-NC-ND), which allows anyone to copy and distribute a work, but only for noncommercial purposes and only in its unadapted form.
   

Learn More: For more information about transferring copyright and granting licenses to publishers, read “The Grant of Rights Clause” (Chapter 5) in the open access book Understanding and Negotiating Book Publication Contracts from the Authors Alliance. For more information about CC licenses, see below.

More detailed information about Creative Commons licenses coming soon! (In the meantime, you can learn a lot by exploring the Creative Commons website.)