IP Licensing Agreement
Lets someone use your intellectual property without owning it.
Legal rights in creations of the mind, including trademarks, copyrights and sometimes trade secrets. Social media campaigns rely heavily on IP: logos, brand names, video footage, photos, captions, music and UGC must all be cleared and used under the proper licences.
- Business days
- 1–5Business days
- Lawyer reviewed
- 100%Lawyer reviewed
- Surprise bills
- $0Surprise bills
What an IP Licensing Agreement should include
What is licensed — the specific rights, identified precisely enough that both sides know the boundary.
Scope — exclusive or not, territory, field of use, and duration.
Sublicensing — whether the licensee may pass rights on, and on what terms.
Fees — one-off, royalty, or minimum guarantee, and how it is reported and audited.
Quality and approvals — your control over how the IP is used, particularly for anything brand-facing.
Termination and effect — what ends the licence, and what the licensee may keep doing afterwards.
When you need one
When you want someone else to use your IP commercially and you intend to keep owning it — a distribution arrangement, a white-label deal, a brand collaboration. If the other side needs to own the output, you are looking at an assignment instead.
How Ruby drafts it
Tell us what you need
Describe the agreement, your business context, and how fast you need it. A few smart questions, not a legal questionnaire. Your price and turnaround are confirmed before anything starts.
Ruby drafts it
Once pricing is confirmed a qualified Ruby lawyer is assigned to your file, and the first draft is built from your answers and real Canadian statute.
A licensed lawyer reviews every line
A lawyer licensed in Canada reviews and finalizes the document before it reaches you, and writes the plain-language summary that comes with it.
Signed, stored, and yours to revisit
You get the final agreement and its summary, stored so you can come back to it rather than hunting through email for the current version.
The fee is set before any of that starts. Hourly billing moves as scope does; a flat fee is one number, confirmed in writing, that doesn’t change after the work is done. See how Ruby prices agreements.
Or did you mean one of these?
These get confused with an IP Licensing Agreement often enough to be worth ruling out before you buy the wrong document.
Questions people ask
A licence is permission to use; you keep ownership and can set limits and take it back. An assignment transfers ownership outright. Which one you want is usually obvious once framed that way, and getting it wrong is difficult to undo.
Exclusivity is worth real money and should be priced and bounded. Exclusive within a territory, a field of use, or a period is often the sensible middle ground between exclusive everywhere and non-exclusive.
Most often as a percentage of the licensee's revenue from the licensed use, with a definition of revenue that matters more than the percentage. Reporting and audit rights are what make the number checkable.
Looking for the plain definition rather than the document? See IP Licensing Agreement in the Ruby legal glossary.
This page is general information about Canadian business law and is not legal advice. Laws differ by province and change over time, and how they apply depends on your circumstances. For advice on your situation, speak with a lawyer licensed in your province.
Need a IP Licensing Agreement?
Ruby drafts it for a flat $799 CAD, confirmed before any work begins, with a licensed Canadian lawyer on every document.