The licences are redistributed. In the French system, there is a list of qualified harvesters, by seniority, who've worked as crew, who've come up in the fishery and who've grown up in fishing communities. When a licence becomes available, the next qualified person within a region or district has access to the licence.
They have to pay licence fees, which maintains the overall system for sustaining the administration of the licensing system, but they don't have to buy the licence. Because no one ever had to do that, it's not a barrier to people getting into the industry and so on.