If you own the copyright on a piece of intellectual property, you have the ability to grant a license to use it, in much the same way you can grant licenses to use any type of property that you own.
This is from an American point of view - haven't the faintest idea what European/Asian/etc concepts look like.
Bearing in mind copyright is governed by the Berne Convention, it's pretty much the same the world over.
And something which seems to get a heck of a lot of people trying to grok the GPL (especially over dual-licencing), you need to understand that it is *impossible* to have both a copyright and a licence to the same thing.
If I own the copyright to a work, then I do *not* have a licence. If I have a licence, then obviously I do not own the copyright. Once you've grasped that fact, licensing should be a lot easier to understand - failure to grasp that seems to lie behind an awful lot of confusion over copyright.
Oh - it is possible to have both copyrights in and licences to a work, but only if it's a composite work, and for each bit of that work you only have one or the other - let's say three people composited the parts, one for each instrument, of Poulenc's sonata for trumpet, horn and trombone. If, as a trombonist, I did the trombone, then I would own the copyright in the trombone part, and have a licence to the other two parts (and to the entire work as a whole). But I *don't* have both a licence and a copyright applying to any single part of the work.
Cheers, Wol -- Anthony W. Youngman - wol at thewolery dot demon dot co dot uk HEX wondered how much he should tell the Wizards. He felt it would not be a good idea to burden them with too much input. Hex always thought of his reports as Lies-to-People. The Science of Discworld : (c) Terry Pratchett 1999
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