Licensing Your Work on Sokobuni: The Seven Tiers Explained
When you list artistic or digital work on Sokobuni, you're not just setting a price — you're choosing what a buyer can actually do with it. This article walks through the seven licence tiers available on the platform and, in particular, why the reversion clause ("use it or lose it") is a negotiating point worth understanding before you sell anything exclusively.
Read IP Contract Essentials first if you haven't already — this article assumes you know the difference between licensing and assigning, and between exclusive and non-exclusive deals.
What You'll Learn
- The seven licence tiers Sokobuni offers, and what each one grants and reserves
- Why "use it or lose it" reversion clauses matter far more for exclusive deals than non-exclusive ones
- How to read the reversion terms on your own listings before a buyer asks
Key Takeaways
The seven tiers, in plain language
Every product page shows buyers a structured "What you're licensing" panel — no dense legal prose, just what transfers and what doesn't. As the seller, this is what each tier means for you:
| Tier | What the buyer gets | Stays exclusive? | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Personal Use | Reproduce, display privately | No | Wallpaper, private prints |
| Editorial | Reproduce/distribute in news, education, documentary context | No | Journalism, blogs, coursework |
| Standard Commercial | Marketing/advertising use, 24-month term | No | Websites, ads, social media |
| Extended | Same as Commercial plus broadcast and unlimited print runs, 36-month term | No | TV/radio campaigns, billboards |
| Merchandise | Reproduce on physical goods for resale, royalty-based | No | Apparel, homeware, prints-for-sale |
| Digital Product & App | Embed in an app, game, or software UI | No | Mobile apps, games, product design |
| Exclusive Buyout | Full commercial rights, work delisted from further sale | Yes | A brand wants sole use of a piece |
Every tier keeps your moral rights — attribution, and the right to object to how your work is presented — with you, permanently. No tier buys those out, because under Kenyan law (and most jurisdictions worldwide) they can't be sold.
Why reversion matters most on the Exclusive Buyout tier
Here's the distinction that's easy to miss: on every tier except Exclusive Buyout, a sale doesn't stop you from selling the same work again. A Standard Commercial licence, a Merchandise licence, a Digital Product licence — none of these are a rival good for you. You can sell the same work to ten different buyers under ten non-exclusive licences, and each one is worth the same regardless of whether the others exist.
An exclusive licence is different. The moment a buyer takes exclusivity, your work is delisted from further sale on Sokobuni for the term of the deal. If that buyer never actually uses it — no campaign, no product, nothing — you've lost the ability to sell it to anyone else for as long as the exclusivity runs, for zero benefit. That's the exact "lock-in effect" a reversion clause exists to prevent.
This is why Sokobuni's Exclusive Buyout template carries a 9-month non-use reversion trigger — tighter than the 12-month trigger on Standard Commercial and Extended, where an unused non-exclusive licence costs you nothing because you were never blocked from selling elsewhere anyway.
Concretely, a reversion clause should say something like: if the buyer hasn't exploited the exclusive right within N months, the exclusivity automatically lapses and you're free to relist or resell the work. Ask for this explicitly on any exclusive deal — on or off Sokobuni — the same way you'd ask a publisher for a reversion clause on an out-of-print book (see Literary & Publishing Contracts for that version of the same principle).
Reading your own listing's terms
Before you list a work under any tier, check:
- Territory — worldwide by default, which is usually what you want as a Kenyan creator selling to a global buyer base
- Duration — fixed-term tiers revert to you automatically at the end of the term; perpetual tiers (Personal, Digital Product & App) don't expire on their own
- Royalty vs. flat fee — only the Merchandise tier is priced with a royalty (8%) plus an advance, because merchandise revenue scales with the buyer's own sales; every other tier is a flat fee
- Reversion trigger, if the tier has one — Standard Commercial and Extended revert after 12 months of non-use, Merchandise reverts if sales fall below a floor, Exclusive Buyout reverts after 9 months of non-use
Sokobuni's current licence templates are a first draft, adapted from ARIPO's contract guidelines and cross-checked against the Kenya Copyright Act — they have not yet been reviewed by a lawyer. Treat the specific numbers (term lengths, royalty rates, reversion windows) as a starting point for negotiation, not a final legal position, until that review happens.
Practical Steps for Sokobuni Sellers
- If a buyer asks about exclusivity, know that it removes your work from sale elsewhere on the platform for the term — price accordingly, and check the reversion window before agreeing
- Non-exclusive tiers (Personal through Digital Product & App) don't block you from other sales, so there's no reversion risk to negotiate on those
- For a Merchandise licence, ask what "sales below floor" actually means in the listing before assuming it protects you the same way a fixed non-use trigger would
- Keep an eye on your Exclusive Buyout listings as their term approaches expiry — plan whether you want to renew, relist elsewhere, or let it revert