After an ownership or exclusive sale

Three of the six Marketplace rights close the listing when they sell: Full ownership, Ownership, credit the writer, and Exclusive use. This page explains what changes at that moment — for the seller, for the buyer, and for everyone else.

Why these three close

Ownership can only change hands once: after you've sold a work outright, it isn't yours to sell again. Exclusivity is the same shape — "only you may use this" stops being true the moment a second buyer gets in. So when any of these three sells, the listing comes off the Marketplace and no further rights on it can be bought.

The other three rights (Performance and recording, Performance only, Video / project use) are non-exclusive — they never close a listing and can sell any number of times.

For the seller

• Your listing closes immediately. It leaves the Marketplace browse pages and can't be edited or relisted as the same work.
• The sale still shows in My sales & listings, marked sold, with the price and your 85% share.
• What you've given up depends on the tier:
• Full ownership — the work is the buyer's now: they can use, change, record, release, perform, and resell it, and they owe you no credit and no further payment.
• Ownership, credit the writer — same transfer, with one lasting condition: your name must be credited wherever the work is published or released.
• Exclusive use — you keep ownership, but you may not sell or license the same rights to anyone else, and you shouldn't use the work in ways that break the buyer's exclusivity. The work being exclusively licensed also means shopping it to other artists is off the table.
• Earlier non-exclusive sales still stand. If you sold performance or recording rights to other buyers before the closing sale, those buyers keep exactly what they bought. A closing sale doesn't reach backwards.
• Think before you price these tiers. An ownership sale is permanent — there's no un-sell. The guidance in The rights tiers, explained can help you decide whether to offer them at all.

For the buyer

• Your purchase page is your proof. It holds the full work and the exact terms snapshot from the moment you bought — see Buying a work.
• Ownership tiers: the work is yours to use, change, record, release, and perform. With Ownership, credit the writer, remember the one duty that came with it: credit the writer by name wherever the work is published or released.
• Exclusive use: you're the only person who may use the work under those rights — but you don't own it, and you can't resell the work or hand the rights to someone else.
• You don't need to do anything to "claim" the closing. It happens automatically at purchase; the listing closing is the site's record that the right moved to you.

For everyone else

• The work disappears from the Marketplace — there's nothing left to buy on it.
• If you'd already bought a non-exclusive right on it earlier, your purchase is untouched: your downloads, your full text, and your terms all keep working from My purchases.

A note on what the site can and can't do

The Marketplace records sales and terms, and your purchase page is solid proof of what was agreed. The site isn't a court, though — if a seller sells a work here and then misuses it elsewhere, that's a dispute between the people involved, with the sale record as the evidence. Sell only what's yours, and buy in good faith, and the record does its job.