We know this is not a blog on a legal niche to talk about copyright. But we have to know about it briefly as it is partly related to all kinds of content creation, including blogging. Content creation requires media files, mostly images, audio, and videos and these are the undoubted assets to the digital world. If you want to know more about blogging, then check out our article on blogging here.
We have to use these digital assets for personal or commercial reasons on different platforms like blogs, social media or advertisements to stay firm in this competitive market. So we should know which media files are copyright protected and which are not. The correct license for using media files can save you from copyright infringement or any legal procedure. Before proceeding further, let’s take a quick look at some legal terms.
Copyright:
Copyright is a legal term used to describe the rights of the creators over their creative works. You have to get permission to use those digital assets for personal or commercial purposes from the concerned authority. It is known as a license. In some cases, it may require buying it from them. Sometimes, you can get it by simply giving credits to the rightful owner. It is known as attribution. It is a process where you acknowledge someone like the creator of the creative asset.
The license also has two use cases. One is for personal usage and other is for commercial usage.
- Personal Usage: Here, we use the contents in our creative works like blogs, websites, social media etc.
- Commercial Usage: It includes promotional content, affiliate marketing or advertisements from which you can earn money.
Every license comes with specific terms and conditions. There, it mentions how & where you can or cannot use the assets.
Types of Licenses:
Several licenses offer differing extents of privileges to the users. Only the popular ones are given below.
1. Commercial License:
It permits you to use any creator’s asset for commercial projects like promotions, banners, ledgers, or printing over newspapers, books, t-shirts, mockups etc.
2. Non-Commercial License:
It is not related to business or money-making. Some example use cases might be personal blogs, social media, newsletters, etc.
3. Copyright-Free License:
Some creators release their creative assets totally free of cost and grant approval to the users to use them in whatever way they want. A copyright-free asset does not deliver any limitations. Here, attribution is desired but not required.
4. Royalty-Free License:
Here copyright goes to the owner. However, anyone can use them by paying a one-time fee. It implies that you pay for it once and keep using it forever. So don’t mix it with a copyright-free license. These two are not the same as you think.
5. One-time Use License:
Here, you pay once and use it forever. However, it is an object-specific license. For example, if you buy a license for an asset and now want to use another one, then you have to pay for the second one again.
6. Creative Commons License
Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation. It improves the availability of creative resources online. The Creative Commons Licenses are of various types, like CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA, etc. They make a creative asset available for free around the world. Copyright-free version is the Creative Commons CC0 License. Here, CC0 means “No Copyrights Reserved”. So, the owner of the creative asset gives up their copyright and creates the work available freely under the public domain. These assets can be used by the users however they want! If you want to know more, you can check their website here.