Can you claim authorship of PLR content?

A few weeks ago a client sent me an email to ask exactly how far she could go in terms of making the PLR content I’ve created her own. It was a great question, so I thought I’d write a blog post about it.

Here’s the dilemma. You want to be able to add your own branding to private label rights content because that’s the main point of PLR. But the licence on my PLR says that the buyer must edit it by at least 50% before s/he can claim authorship. So what’s allowed and what isn’t?

First let me say that I’m speaking about my own PLR and my own licensing here. Always check the license of PLR before you buy it as it can vary quite a bit.

I make a lot of video PLR, which is a little different to text PLR in that it’s not as easy to edit. It’s not that hard, but you can’t just open up word processing software and move the paragraphs around the way you can with text. That means – in my opinion anyway – that you’re more likely to see unedited video PLR out there than you are unedited text.

What I don’t want to happen is for the same viewer to watch the videos I’ve produced on the sites of two different people who are both claiming they made the videos themselves. That would make one of them look like they had ripped off the others’ content and I wouldn’t want my clients to be in that position. That’s why I don’t allow my clients to claim they made my PLR unless they’ve edited it so much you that the situation I described wouldn’t occur.

By the way, I don’t allow my clients to put my name on the videos either. That’s because once I’ve sold a pack of videos I’d have no control over how my name is used. For example, by putting my name on a video someone could imply that I was working as a trainer for their company, which wouldn’t be correct.

So if you can’t put my name on the PLR and you can’t claim authorship yourself, what can you do? Well, there’s plenty of middle ground between these two extremes. Here are some examples of what you can do:

• Add an intro and an outro to your video which has your logo on it. This is adding your branding, but is different from claiming you recorded or voiced the video yourself.
• Post my articles on your blog, add your own content, rearrange or delete part of mine. But only add ‘By [Name]’ if more than 50% of the content is written by someone other than me.
• Turn my content into a course or ebook, but rather than name yourself as the author or instructor, you could use the word ‘brought to you by [name]’ where the name could be a person, a business or a brand. Or just don’t give an author name at all.

Hope that helps! If you have any questions, just leave me a comment. And you can find out more about the PLR content I sell here.