This page describes conventions that are common in the digital-products market. It is general information written by people who sell things, not lawyers. Copyright and contract law differ substantially between countries, and a term that is routine in one jurisdiction can be unenforceable in another. If real money, a licensing dispute or a business partnership is involved, have a qualified lawyer in your jurisdiction review the actual wording before you rely on it.
A licence is not the thing that gives you rights
The most common misunderstanding is thinking the licence creates your ownership. It doesn't. In the United States, per the Copyright Office, a work is protected from the moment it is “created and fixed in a tangible form” — the instant you save the file. Registration is voluntary, though for U.S. works it is a prerequisite to filing an infringement lawsuit.
So you already hold the exclusive rights the day you finish the artwork. A licence is the opposite gesture: it is you giving some of those rights away, in writing, on conditions you choose. Every clause below is a decision about how much you're handing over. Nothing you write can add to what you started with.
Two consequences follow. First, a vague licence is not neutral — ambiguity in a permission grant tends not to work in the seller's favour, because the buyer can point at the sentence you wrote. Second, and more importantly, copyright protects creative expression but explicitly does not cover facts, ideas, systems or methods of operation. A licence over a planner template protects the layout and artwork you made; it does not give you a monopoly on the idea of a weekly planner.
The clauses, annotated
These are the recurring components. Almost every digital-product licence in circulation is some subset of them, arranged differently.
Scope of the grant
also: “licence grant”, “permitted use”“You are granted a non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use this file for…”
Non-exclusive means you can sell the same licence to a thousand other people — without it, an argument exists that the first buyer got the only copy. Non-transferable means the buyer cannot hand their permission to someone else. These two words are doing most of the work in the sentence.
Sellers who write “you may use this file” and nothing else have granted something extremely broad. Everything narrower has to be stated; silence is generally read as permission in a grant of this shape.
Personal vs commercial use
the line every buyer asks about“Personal use only. Commercial use requires an extended licence.”
Splits your market in two and lets you price the halves differently. It is the single most valuable clause in a digital shop, which is why it appears in nearly all of them.
“Commercial” is not self-defining. Is a nonprofit's fundraiser commercial? A church bulletin? A gift for a colleague? A blog with one ad on it? Licences that stop at the word itself generate exactly these questions in your inbox forever. The ones that don't spell out the boundary with examples on both sides — and, crucially, name the specific uses you intend to prohibit rather than gesturing at a category.
Volume or unit cap
also: “print run limit”, “seat limit”“May be used to produce up to 500 finished physical items. Beyond that, contact us for an extended licence.”
Ties your price to the buyer's scale. A hobbyist making twenty tote bags and a brand making twenty thousand are not the same customer, and a cap is how a single listing serves both.
Unit caps are essentially unverifiable — you will never know what a buyer produced. Treat the number as a pricing signal and an invitation to upgrade, not as an enforcement mechanism. A cap so low it is routinely exceeded quietly just trains buyers to ignore the licence entirely.
Redistribution of the file itself
the clause that actually protects the business“The file may not be resold, shared, sublicensed or redistributed in its original or an editable form, whether alone or as part of a bundle, and whether or not modified.”
Separates using the design from passing on the design. A buyer printing your artwork onto mugs is your customer; a buyer uploading your SVG to a file-sharing site is your competitor. This is the clause that names the difference.
“Whether or not modified” and “as part of a bundle” are the two phrases people leave out and then regret. Recolouring a file or dropping it into a mega-pack of 300 designs is precisely how redistribution usually presents itself.
Derivative works
may they change it?“You may resize, recolour and crop the artwork for your own project. Modified versions remain subject to this licence and may not be redistributed.”
Answers the question your buyers will otherwise ask one at a time. It also closes the loophole where someone changes a hue and claims the result is now their own work.
Banning modification outright is usually a mistake for craft files — resizing is the product. The useful line is not “don't change it” but “changing it doesn't release it from these terms.”
Print-on-demand and platform carve-outs
the modern problem clause“Use on print-on-demand platforms — including but not limited to Redbubble, Merch on Demand and Zazzle — is not permitted under this licence.”
POD is the one commercial use that scales without the buyer holding stock, and it is also where a design most often ends up competing directly against you. Many sellers permit general commercial use and carve POD out specifically.
There is a second-order issue people miss: POD platforms typically require the uploader to warrant that they hold the necessary rights, and some run automated originality checks. A buyer who uploads your widely-sold design can trigger a takedown against themselves. Saying so in the licence saves both of you a support thread.
Attribution
credit requirement“Credit is appreciated but not required” — or, at the other extreme, “visible credit to [shop] is required wherever the design appears.”
Marketing, mostly. A mandatory-credit licence is a trade: cheaper access in exchange for visibility.
Mandatory attribution on a physical product is often impractical — nobody is printing your shop name on the inside of a mug. If you require credit, say where it must appear, or the clause is unfollowable and will simply be ignored.
Warranty and liability
the boring paragraph at the end“The file is provided as is, without warranty of any kind…”
Attempts to limit your exposure if the file doesn't open, prints badly, or the buyer's commercial venture using it fails.
This is the clause most dependent on jurisdiction. Consumer-protection law in many countries restricts how far a seller can disclaim liability to a consumer, and a sweeping disclaimer copied from a US template may be partly void elsewhere. It is also the clause where copying wording you don't understand is least defensible. If it matters to you, this is the paragraph to take to a lawyer.
What a licence cannot do
Equally worth knowing, because a lot of effort goes into clauses that were never going to work.
- It cannot grant rights you don't hold. If your design uses a font, a stock photo, a brush pack or a clipart element, your ability to license it onward is limited by those licences. A commercial-use grant you issue over an asset whose own licence forbids redistribution is worth nothing, and the exposure is yours, not your buyer's. Creative Commons puts the same point plainly in its own guidance: don't apply a licence to material you don't own or aren't authorised to license.
- It cannot be quietly withdrawn later. Whatever permissions a buyer received under the terms in force on the day they bought, they generally keep. You can change your terms for future sales; you cannot reach back through past ones. Public licences make this explicit — Creative Commons states flatly that CC licences are not revocable, and that anyone holding a copy may keep using it under those terms for the duration of copyright. Your own licence behaves the same way in practice, so version it and date it rather than editing in place.
- It cannot enforce itself. A licence gives you standing to complain, a platform takedown to point at, and a document to attach to a cease-and-desist. It does not stop a file from being copied. Every practical protection — watermarked previews, a visible terms page, delivering flattened formats where the editable source isn't needed — sits outside the document.
- It cannot override the marketplace you sell on. If your licence and a platform's seller policy disagree, the platform's rules govern your account. Read the policy of the marketplace you actually sell on before writing terms that assume otherwise; those policies change and are not summarised here.
When not to write your own at all
If what you want is simply “anyone may use this, credit me” or “anyone may use this, no conditions”, a standard public licence is a better instrument than anything homemade. Creative Commons publishes six licences plus CC0, built from four conditions: attribution (BY), share-alike (SA), no-derivatives (ND) and non-commercial (NC). CC BY permits commercial use and adaptation with credit; CC BY-NC-ND is the most restrictive of the six, allowing only unadapted, non-commercial copying with credit; CC0 places the work in the public domain with no rights reserved. They are internationally drafted, machine-readable, and instantly recognised, which a paragraph you wrote yourself is not.
Where they don't fit is exactly the case most shops are in: a paid product with a commercial tier, a unit cap, and a POD carve-out. The CC suite has no concept of a volume limit or a paid upgrade. That is the point at which you need your own terms — and if the product is a meaningful part of your income, the point at which the wording is worth a lawyer's hour.
Practical assembly
A workable licence for a small digital shop is short and specific: who is granted what, the personal/commercial line drawn with examples, what may not be redistributed, the POD position stated explicitly, and a dated version number so you can tell later which terms applied to which sale. Length is not the goal. A licence nobody reads because it runs to nine screens protects less than five clear sentences that a buyer actually absorbs.
Our digital product licence generator assembles a plain-language draft from exactly those decisions — you tick what buyers may and may not do and it writes out the corresponding terms for you to copy, print or include in a download. Treat what it produces as a starting draft to review, not as a finished legal instrument. Deliver it as a file alongside the product rather than only in the listing description, so the buyer keeps a copy of the terms they actually agreed to; if the product is a cut file, it slots naturally into the bundle of formats you're shipping anyway.
Written July 2026. General information only — not legal advice.
Primary sources: U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright in General FAQ — that protection attaches the moment a work is created and fixed in a tangible form, that registration is voluntary but is a prerequisite to filing an infringement suit for U.S. works, and that copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems or methods of operation; Creative Commons, “About CC Licenses” — the six licences, their four conditions, and CC0; Creative Commons FAQ — that CC licences are not revocable, that licensees may continue under the terms for the duration of applicable rights even after a licensor stops distributing, and that a licence should not be applied to material you do not own or are not authorised to license. Marketplace-specific rules are deliberately not quoted here: platform seller policies are the marketplace's to state, they change, and several block automated retrieval, so we could not verify current wording. Check the policy of the platform you sell on directly. The clause conventions themselves are market practice, not statute, and are described as such.