We’re Open Sourcing Our Licensing Agreements, But We’re Not Stopping There

In November 2021, we did something at Tally Labs that was fairly novel (no pun intended) in the NFT space. We opened up our proprietary software platform to license more than 4,000 Bored Apes and Mutant Apes in our first book, Bored & Dangerous. That licensing period was electric, with community members making deals with each other and then turning around and licensing their IP to us to be used in the book. This was the first instance of mass IP licensing in the NFT space.

Since that time, we’ve seen an explosion in interest from people who want the opportunity to license their NFT avatars. This is incredible, and it’s a dream come true for us. We’re working on a ton behind the scenes, including a revamped licensing platform that will be 10x better than the MVP that licensed 4,000+ characters last year. It’s also built to support multiple communities, not just Apes/Mutants. We cannot wait for you to see it.

We’ve also spent tens of thousands of dollars working with the world’s top IP counsel on different licensing templates that make sense for different use cases. We haven’t done this for Tally Labs — we’ve done it for you, the community member. We have an opportunity in Web3 to reset the standard of what ownership means and what you can do with your IP. We are so proud to be building for you, and we intend to keep investing in legal services to support the incredible creativity and ingenuity that comes from community members owning their own IP. We intend to keep sharing that with the space and keep charting the path. We’ve also got some really fun licensing opportunities up our sleeve for you to experience this platform with.

Our Current Licensing Agreement

In late 2021, we unveiled 2 different licensing agreements:

1. A licensing agreement between you (a community member with NFT IP) and us (a business who wanted to use that IP)
2. A licensing agreement between you (a community member with NFT IP) and a Writer’s Room member (another community member who wanted to use that IP). This is because Writer’s Room NFTs remain the key to license your IP to Tally Labs content.

In both cases, the licensing agreements were incredibly specific. That matters because we wanted to limit the scope of things that we as Tally Labs or that fellow community members could do with your IP. Some folks in traditional media pushed us to try to capture more rights with our agreements to make it more appealing for a buyer (studio, streamer, etc) — exclusive rights, merchandising rights, rights of first refusal, and more.

We said no.

We said no because while Web2 media has been built on the basis of company-owned IP, Web3 media is being built on the basis of community-owned IP. We would never ask you to give us the rights to something we don’t need just so that it can strengthen our bargaining position later, at your expense…

Today, we are proud to release our licenses on our website for the entire NFT space to download and use.

Please note that if you intend to use these licenses, there are a number of clauses that you’ll need to modify to fit them to your unique use case. These agreements are the foundation of future, scalable licensing agreements in the NFT space, but again they were written for our very specific Bored & Dangerous use case.

While those who have signed the agreements have had access to them since they originally read them, we encourage others to download the agreements, to read them, to unpack them, and to feel free to use them with modifications for any licensing need in the future.

We’re Not Stopping Here

At the time of this writing, we are also deep with our Web3 and IP counsel to draft updated, scalable licensing agreements that make more sense for the entire space. We’ve learned that there are a million different use cases for licensing NFT IP. Some of them need to be exclusive. Some of them involve up-front payments. Some of them are peer-to-peer. Some of them never expire. The list goes on…

While we look forward to you using modified versions of our original licensing agreements, we are also pleased to announce that we are continuing to work with legal counsel to draft a comprehensive and modular licensing agreement that anyone can bend to their specific use case.

We will be unveiling this licensing agreement in our v2 licensing platform for licensing to the Jenkins the Valet Audio Experience (podcast), and we are building it with other creators in mind.

At Tally Labs, we build for our own use cases, but we also build for Web3. We are all creating together, and we have an opportunity to move faster than any other industry by sharing the things we’ve built with each other. This work was done for the entire space, and we can’t wait to see what you all do with it.

More to come soon.