Free to download is not free to use

The four questions a licence answers

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.

1. May I use it commercially?
2. Must I credit it, and in what exact words?
3. May I change it?
4. What does my use oblige me to do to my own work?

That fourth one catches people, and it is worth taking seriously before anything else.

Creative Commons, by mechanism

Creative Commons licences are built from four clauses that combine.

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• ND (NoDerivatives): no modification. Cropping, colour-grading, cutting a song shorter, laying a title over it: all modifications.

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.

Public domain is a date, and the date depends where you are

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.

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.

The free stock sites, and their actual terms

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.

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.

Keep a credits file from the first asset

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.

hero.jpg | unsplash.com/photos/abc123 | Unsplash Licence | 2026-03-04 | no credit required
intro.mp3 | freemusicarchive.org/... | CC BY 4.0 | 2026-03-04 | "Nocturne" by A. Vaz, CC BY 4.0

Fair use and fair dealing are not a plan

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.

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.