The Three Pillars of Monetization
Content monetization rests on the copyright system: to earn from content you must hold the exclusive rights of use, you must grant the licence that empowers the platform or brand, and you must know the way out when someone else monetizes without a licence. This page explains these three pillars on the basis of articles eighteen, forty and fifty-nine of the law.
What You Must Hold to Monetize
Under article eighteen, the author or other holder of copyright has the exclusive right to use the work in any manner. This means the right to carry out, permit or prohibit the reproduction, distribution, import, public display, public performance and public transmission of the work — by air, by cable or by wire so that the work is available at a time and place chosen by the person — as well as translation and processing.
For monetization this means: the licensee — a platform, brand or publisher — exercises only those rights the licensor holds. The author also has the right to receive an author's honourarium for any form of use of the work. The monetization chain therefore always begins with one question: which right is transferred to the service, and on what ground. Where even one link of the chain is empty — a right not transferred or a use not covered by the licence — the revenue from that link stands in a legally dangered zone and becomes the ground of demands in a dispute. The licence text is therefore the main instrument of monetization, not a formality.
The Monetization Deal — the Licence Contract
Article forty defines the mandatory content of the deal: a licence contract must stipulate an exact description of the work to be used — title, volume, genre — the concrete type of use, the term and territory, the amount of the honourarium or the procedure for determining it for each type, and the procedure and time-limit for payment. Every use not written in remains with the author or other right holder, so the list in the contract must be complete and precise: the more exactly the type of use is described, the smaller the disputable field.
The defaults also matter: where the concrete type of use is not stated, the contract is deemed concluded for the use necessary for the parties' intention; where the term is not stated, termination is possible after 3 years with notice 6 months in advance; where the territory is not stated, only Georgia is covered.
The amount of the honourarium and the procedure for its accounting and payment are established by a contract concluded between the author, the other right holder or the collective-management organization, and the user — and the negotiation of monetization terms runs precisely within that frame. The honourarium is therefore not a gesture of the platform's goodwill: it is the subject of a deal whose rules the law regulates.