I think that before we talk about what price the extended licence should be, we need to talk about what is permitted by the extended licence and what is not.
There are two reasons for this. 1. So that buyers understand exactly when they neeed to buy an extended licence. 2. What they can then do with that licence.
Right now the text of the extended licence is a mess. Its contradictory, unclear and in my opinion unsatisfactory given the implications involved for our hard work. The licence text talks about not permitting resale rights, but then almost every subsequent clause refers to the many forms of resale permitted, which themselves are confusing to the point that anyone can do anything with a file bought on extended licence and say “it was implied in the licence terms to be ok”.
For example until very recently there was a clause (now quietly removed) in the extended licence t&c’s which referred to buying something on GraphicRiver using extended licence and then being permitted to incorporate it into an item on ActiveDen for sale. Because these t&c’s are trying to cover all item types on all marketplace (not wise) , it was then accepted to be ok for Envato Authors to buy sliders and other plugins on CC and incorporate them into their templates on TF for sale. The extended licence on CC for a slider is 5x, which is crazy low, not to mention then having a unique slider to sell as many times as you like on TF where a unique slider can make the difference between average and good sales.
This clause is now gone but I don’t believe that the behavior it generated is gone. For example recently myself and my partner created a slider for CodeCanyon in another account. We opted out of the extended licence for the reasons stated above. Our first page of comments was almost all from Envatos authors looking to purchase an extended licence! People weren’t interested in the general licence of $12 but would prefer to pay $60 and do what they liked with it.
Shortly afterwards, we were contact by a buyer who wanted to buy an extended licence “for his clients”. On further investigation it turned out that this buyer was buying top selling plugins from CC at 5x the price, making some small edits to them to make them compatible with an enterprise CMS and then selling them (complete with full original author’s description & images) on another marketplace. This is ridiculous, but funniest of all this can interpreted from the extended licence terms, to be permitted! To this buyer his small edits equaled incorporating it into this own work! When we pointed it out to him that this practivce was not permitted, his reply was that then he would only sell these items on his own site, because this would mean it was being sold to his clients only, which was permitted by the extended licence! This is only one example, I’m quite sure there are many more.
Bottom line, we don’t trust the extended licence. With this licence Envato is not doing enough to ensure our work is protected. I feel that the conversation about how much an extended licence should cost is premature, and would only make sense to talk about it if the fine lines between what is permitted by the extended licenced and what is not, is clarified beyond doubt.
I would suggest that many more examples are provided and that there are separate provisions for separate item types or marketplaces.
DOK
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