A copyright is a collection of rights that automatically vest to someone who creates an original work of authorship like a literary work, song, movie or software. These rights include the right to reproduce the work, to prepare derivative works, to distribute copies, and to perform and display the work publicly.
To understand how these rights can be used or licensed, it’s helpful to analogize them to a bundle of sticks, where each stick represents a one of these rights. The copyright owner has the right to keep each “stick” for themselves, to transfer them individually to one or more people, or to transfer them collectively to one or more people. In short, copyright allows the owner to choose the ways his/her copyrighted works are made available to the public.