What does Royalty-Free mean?
  • 06 Sep 2022
  • 2 Minutes to read
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What does Royalty-Free mean?

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Article Summary

Royalty-Free

A Royalty-Free license provides great flexibility for our buyers to create content with a peace of mind:-

  • with no additional licensing fees required,
  • in unlimited projects forever,
  • across all media worldwide, and
  • safe for commercial use
  • subject to the 4 basic ideas below.

To enjoy all these benefits, your end product has to adhere to a few restrictions. Here we attempt to distill the royalty-free agreement down to a few basic ideas.

4 Basic Ideas

All of the following rules apply to all our stock content, regardless of whether you paid for them or are using our free stock content.

Basic Idea #1

There are 3 main rules to using our royalty-free stock content:

no-tm
You may not use the stock content as a logo, trademark or service mark.

no-porn
You may not use the stock content in any pornographic, illegal purposes or controversial ways.

no-resell
You may not resell or redistribute the stock content.

Basic Idea #2

What does “reselling or redistributing” mean? Here are a few examples.

no-template
You may not use our stock content in screensavers, templates, standalone backgrounds, stock elements, ringtones, etc.

For Photo, Vector and GIF, the physical reproduction limitation is 1,000 units.

no-download
You may not sell or give away our stock content on, for example, your YouTube channel, your website, P2P file sharing services, etc.

For Photo, Vector and GIF, copies of merchandise for sale are not allowed.

If you wish to use the content in products such as templates, electronic greeting cards, screensavers, wallpapers, or any other electronic or printed matter, you have to obtain a prior written consent of MotionElements and/or make payment of additional License Fees.

Basic Idea #3

no-endorse

If a stock content features a model, and you are using the stock content

  • in a manner that suggests the model personally uses or endorses the product or service, or
  • with a subject that would be unflattering, embarrassing or controversial to a reasonable person,

you have to indicate each such use with a statement that indicates that the person is a model and that the content is being used for illustrative purposes only.

Basic Idea #4

no-authorship

You cannot falsely represent or imply that you are the original creator of your end work if a substantial part of its artistic components is from the stock content.

Similarly for stock music, you cannot use them to create derivative work and pass it off as your own, unless they are labeled with “Available For Musical Works”.

Other Ideas

license-editorial
license-pro
You will notice that some of our stock content are labeled with an “Editorial Use Only” label or a “P.R.O.” label. These stock content do also follow the basic Royalty-Free licensing, only that there are certain additional restrictions or fees to their usage.


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