{"course":{"slug":"visual-storytelling","title":"Making It Say Something","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/visual-storytelling","level":"beginner","track":"create"},"lesson":{"slug":"found-material-and-licences","title":"Free to download is not free to use","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/visual-storytelling/found-material-and-licences","position":30,"of":64,"minutes":9,"answer":"A licence answers whether you may use it commercially, must credit it, may change it.","keyIdea":"A licence answers whether you may use it commercially, must credit it, may change it, and what it obliges your own work to become. And ShareAlike and NonCommercial are the two clauses that reach furthest into work you thought was yours."},"body":{"format":"markdown","text":"## The four questions a licence answers\n\nEvery piece of material you did not make (a photograph, a piece of music, a clip, a font, a map, a chart) comes with a licence, even when nobody shows it to you. A licence answers four questions, and if you cannot answer all four you do not have permission, you have a download.\n\n1. **May I use it commercially?**\n2. **Must I credit it, and in what exact words?**\n3. **May I change it?**\n4. **What does my use oblige me to do to my own work?**\n\nThat fourth one catches people, and it is worth taking seriously before anything else.\n\n## Creative Commons, by mechanism\n\nCreative Commons licences are built from four clauses that combine.\n\n- **BY**: attribution required. Nearly all of them include it. The credit is not a courtesy; it is the condition on which the permission rests, and omitting it means you are using the work without a licence.\n- **SA** (ShareAlike): a copyleft clause. If you make something derived from it, your derivative must carry the same licence. That is the clause that reaches into your own work. A ShareAlike photograph in a commercial brochure can oblige you to license the brochure the same way, which is very unlikely to be what your client agreed to.\n- **NC** (NonCommercial): no commercial use. This is the most dangerous clause in practice, because \"commercial\" is not defined by whether you were paid. It is about the nature of the use. A free video on a business's own channel is promoting a business; whether that counts is arguable, and the argument happens after publication.\n- **ND** (NoDerivatives): no modification. Cropping, colour-grading, cutting a song shorter, laying a title over it: all modifications.\n\n**CC0** is different in kind: a deliberate waiver as close to public domain as the law in a given country allows. It is the only one with no ongoing obligation.\n\n## Public domain is a date, and the date depends where you are\n\nCopyright expires. When it expires is jurisdictional: life of the author plus 70 years in the EU, the UK and the US for most modern works, plus 60 in India, with a tangle of exceptions for anonymous works, sound recordings, films and anything published before various cut-off dates. A work in the public domain in one country can be in copyright in another, and the internet delivers your page to both.\n\nThe practical consequence for a small operator is that \"it's from 1890, it's fine\" is usually right for text and often right for images, and that a 1940s photograph is a research task rather than an assumption.\n\n## The free stock sites, and their actual terms\n\nUnsplash, Pexels and Pixabay are usable and free, and none of them is CC0 any more, whatever people tell you. They run their own licences, which broadly allow commercial use without attribution but forbid selling the image itself unchanged and forbid using an identifiable person in a way that suggests endorsement or shows them in a bad light. That last restriction is the one that bites: a stock face on a poster about debt is a problem regardless of the licence.\n\nFor music, the free paths are real: the YouTube Audio Library, the Free Music Archive, ccMixter, and the large catalogue of attribution-licensed tracks by composers such as Kevin MacLeod, where the required credit line is published verbatim and must be copied exactly. For fonts, Google Fonts is licensed for commercial use including embedding; a font downloaded from a font-sharing site is very often a commercial font being distributed without permission, and your client is the one who gets the letter.\n\n## Keep a credits file from the first asset\n\nOne plain-text file per project, one line per asset: what it is, where it came from with the full URL, the licence name, the date you downloaded it, and the exact attribution string. This takes fifteen seconds at the time and is close to unrecoverable eighteen months later when somebody asks.\n\n```text\nhero.jpg | unsplash.com/photos/abc123 | Unsplash Licence | 2026-03-04 | no credit required\nintro.mp3 | freemusicarchive.org/... | CC BY 4.0 | 2026-03-04 | \"Nocturne\" by A. Vaz, CC BY 4.0\n```\n\n## Fair use and fair dealing are not a plan\n\nYou will be told that short excerpts are fine. What is actually true is that different countries have different, non-equivalent exceptions. The United States has fair use, a flexible four-factor test decided case by case. The United Kingdom, India and many Commonwealth systems have fair dealing, which applies only to enumerated purposes such as criticism, review, reporting and research: a promotional video is not on the list. There is no international rule, the tests are decided after the fact rather than before, and platform takedown systems operate on their own logic regardless of either.\n\nThe disagreement is real and unresolved, and nothing here is legal advice. The working position for somebody without a legal budget: use material you have cleared, and treat any excerpt you cannot clear as a risk you are choosing knowingly rather than a right you have."},"check":{"question":"A designer uses a CC BY-SA photograph inside a paid client brochure, crediting the photographer correctly. What is the specific problem?","options":[{"text":"Attribution licences forbid paid work unless the photographer is separately compensated for the commercial context.","correct":false,"tempting":"Confuses BY with NC and adds a payment condition that no Creative Commons licence contains."},{"text":"Cropping or colour-matching the photo to the brochure counts as a derivative, which BY-SA does not permit.","correct":false,"tempting":"Misreads ShareAlike as NoDerivatives; BY-SA explicitly allows modification, it only constrains what licence the result carries."},{"text":"Creative Commons licences cannot be applied to photographs that contain identifiable people at all, so the licence on this particular image is void from the moment it was offered.","correct":false,"tempting":"Invents a restriction; CC licences cover copyright only and say nothing about the separate question of a subject's image rights."},{"text":"The ShareAlike clause can oblige the derivative work to carry the same licence, which the client almost certainly did not agree to.","correct":true}]},"prev":{"slug":"anonymity-and-harm","title":"Anonymity fails by combination, not by name","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/visual-storytelling/anonymity-and-harm"},"next":{"slug":"data-as-material","title":"A number is a claim with the argument removed","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/visual-storytelling/data-as-material"},"authorship":"Founder and series editor: Dr Mustafa Mun. Written by AI models to a written standard. Exam keys checked blind by a second model: 3,665 of 3,666 agreed. Academic review invited.","review":{"status":"Draft, open for academic review"},"cite":"Addaly (2026) 'Free to download is not free to use', in Making It Say Something. Edited by M. Mun. Addaly. Available at: https://addaly.com/learn/visual-storytelling/found-material-and-licences (Accessed: 13 October 2026).","licence":{"name":"CC BY-NC-SA 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"},"reader":{"schema":1,"title":"Free to download is not free to use","courseTitle":"Making It Say Something","module":{"index":4,"slug":"getting-the-material","title":"Getting the material"},"answer":null,"keyIdea":"A licence answers whether you may use it commercially, must credit it, may change it, and what it obliges your own work to become. And ShareAlike and NonCommercial are the two clauses that reach furthest into work you thought was yours.","hero":{"kind":"plate","image":null,"alt":null,"caption":null},"blocks":[{"t":"h2","id":"the-four-questions-a-licence-answers","runs":[{"text":"The four questions a licence answers"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Every piece of material you did not make (a photograph, a piece of music, a clip, a font, a map, a chart) comes with a licence, even when nobody shows it to you. A licence answers four questions, and if you cannot answer all four you do not have permission, you have a download."}]},{"t":"ol","start":1,"items":[[{"text":"May I use it commercially?","b":true}],[{"text":"Must I credit it, and in what exact words?","b":true}],[{"text":"May I change it?","b":true}],[{"text":"What does my use oblige me to do to my own work?","b":true}]]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"That fourth one catches people, and it is worth taking seriously before anything else."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"creative-commons-by-mechanism","runs":[{"text":"Creative Commons, by mechanism"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Creative Commons licences are built from four clauses that combine."}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"BY","b":true},{"text":": attribution required. Nearly all of them include it. The credit is not a courtesy; it is the condition on which the permission rests, and omitting it means you are using the work without a licence."}],[{"text":"SA","b":true},{"text":" (ShareAlike): a copyleft clause. If you make something derived from it, your derivative must carry the same licence. That is the clause that reaches into your own work. A ShareAlike photograph in a commercial brochure can oblige you to license the brochure the same way, which is very unlikely to be what your client agreed to."}],[{"text":"NC","b":true},{"text":" (NonCommercial): no commercial use. This is the most dangerous clause in practice, because “commercial” is not defined by whether you were paid. It is about the nature of the use. A free video on a business’s own channel is promoting a business; whether that counts is arguable, and the argument happens after publication."}],[{"text":"ND","b":true},{"text":" (NoDerivatives): no modification. Cropping, colour-grading, cutting a song shorter, laying a title over it: all modifications."}]]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"CC0","b":true},{"text":" is different in kind: a deliberate waiver as close to public domain as the law in a given country allows. It is the only one with no ongoing obligation."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"public-domain-is-a-date-and-the-date-depends-where-you-are","runs":[{"text":"Public domain is a date, and the date depends where you are"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Copyright expires. When it expires is jurisdictional: life of the author plus 70 years in the EU, the UK and the US for most modern works, plus 60 in India, with a tangle of exceptions for anonymous works, sound recordings, films and anything published before various cut-off dates. A work in the public domain in one country can be in copyright in another, and the internet delivers your page to both."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The practical consequence for a small operator is that “it’s from 1890, it’s fine” is usually right for text and often right for images, and that a 1940s photograph is a research task rather than an assumption."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"the-free-stock-sites-and-their-actual-terms","runs":[{"text":"The free stock sites, and their actual terms"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Unsplash, Pexels and Pixabay are usable and free, and none of them is CC0 any more, whatever people tell you. They run their own licences, which broadly allow commercial use without attribution but forbid selling the image itself unchanged and forbid using an identifiable person in a way that suggests endorsement or shows them in a bad light. That last restriction is the one that bites: a stock face on a poster about debt is a problem regardless of the licence."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"For music, the free paths are real: the YouTube Audio Library, the Free Music Archive, ccMixter, and the large catalogue of attribution-licensed tracks by composers such as Kevin MacLeod, where the required credit line is published verbatim and must be copied exactly. For fonts, Google Fonts is licensed for commercial use including embedding; a font downloaded from a font-sharing site is very often a commercial font being distributed without permission, and your client is the one who gets the letter."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"keep-a-credits-file-from-the-first-asset","runs":[{"text":"Keep a credits file from the first asset"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"One plain-text file per project, one line per asset: what it is, where it came from with the full URL, the licence name, the date you downloaded it, and the exact attribution string. This takes fifteen seconds at the time and is close to unrecoverable eighteen months later when somebody asks."}]},{"t":"code","lang":"text","label":"Text","text":"hero.jpg | unsplash.com/photos/abc123 | Unsplash Licence | 2026-03-04 | no credit required\nintro.mp3 | freemusicarchive.org/... | CC BY 4.0 | 2026-03-04 | \"Nocturne\" by A. Vaz, CC BY 4.0"},{"t":"h2","id":"fair-use-and-fair-dealing-are-not-a-plan","runs":[{"text":"Fair use and fair dealing are not a plan"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"You will be told that short excerpts are fine. What is actually true is that different countries have different, non-equivalent exceptions. The United States has fair use, a flexible four-factor test decided case by case. The United Kingdom, India and many Commonwealth systems have fair dealing, which applies only to enumerated purposes such as criticism, review, reporting and research: a promotional video is not on the list. There is no international rule, the tests are decided after the fact rather than before, and platform takedown systems operate on their own logic regardless of either."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The disagreement is real and unresolved, and nothing here is legal advice. The working position for somebody without a legal budget: use material you have cleared, and treat any excerpt you cannot clear as a risk you are choosing knowingly rather than a right you have."}]}],"check":{"question":[{"text":"A designer uses a CC BY-SA photograph inside a paid client brochure, crediting the photographer correctly. What is the specific problem?"}],"options":[{"text":[{"text":"Attribution licences forbid paid work unless the photographer is separately compensated for the commercial context."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Confuses BY with NC and adds a payment condition that no Creative Commons licence contains."}]},{"text":[{"text":"Cropping or colour-matching the photo to the brochure counts as a derivative, which BY-SA does not permit."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Misreads ShareAlike as NoDerivatives; BY-SA explicitly allows modification, it only constrains what licence the result carries."}]},{"text":[{"text":"Creative Commons licences cannot be applied to photographs that contain identifiable people at all, so the licence on this particular image is void from the moment it was offered."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Invents a restriction; CC licences cover copyright only and say nothing about the separate question of a subject’s image rights."}]},{"text":[{"text":"The ShareAlike clause can oblige the derivative work to carry the same licence, which the client almost certainly did not agree to."}],"correct":true,"tempting":null}],"order":[1,3,0,2],"why":null},"prev":{"slug":"anonymity-and-harm","title":"Anonymity fails by combination, not by name","minutes":9},"next":{"slug":"data-as-material","title":"A number is a claim with the argument removed","minutes":9}}}