Digital Product License Generator

What a usage licence is actually for

When someone buys a digital file they are not buying the artwork — they are buying permission to use it. Without a written licence, that permission is whatever the buyer assumed it was, which is usually far broader than the seller intended. The most common surprise is a buyer who treats a five-dollar clipart pack as a licence to put the design on shirts and sell them by the thousand. A licence exists to make the boundary explicit before the disagreement, not after it.

The document this tool builds works from the choices you tick. Personal use, commercial use, whether the file may be altered, whether it may end up on physical goods, whether it may be handed to a client — each becomes a clause in plain English rather than boilerplate nobody reads. The restrictions work the same way. "No reselling the file itself" is the clause almost every digital seller wants, because it draws the line between a customer using your work and a customer becoming your competitor with your own file. If you would rather understand the clauses before ticking them, our guide to digital product licence terms, clause by clause goes through what each one says, what it actually does, and where it stops being useful.

Two things a generator cannot do for you. It cannot decide which jurisdiction's law governs the agreement — that depends on where you trade and often on where your buyer is, so the field is left for you to fill in and is simply omitted if you leave it blank. And it cannot make a term enforceable. Consumer law in many countries overrides contract terms, marketplace policies override seller terms, and some restrictions are unenforceable regardless of what a document says. That is what the lawyer is for.

So what is the licence file actually doing?

It records the terms the buyer accepted. That is the whole job. The document does not police anything, does not register anywhere, and does not notify you when it is ignored — it exists so that the permissions are written down in advance, in words a non-lawyer can follow, rather than being assembled after the fact out of two people's opposing memories of what was implied by a product listing. The generator's opening line does exactly this and nothing more: by downloading or using the file, the buyer agrees to the terms that follow.

The practical value shows up in the ordinary case, not the dramatic one. Most buyers who overstep are not pirates; they are someone who assumed a purchased graphic came with the right to print it on two hundred tote bags, because nothing they read said otherwise. A licence turns that into a question they can answer before they order, and it gives you something short and specific to point at afterwards instead of an argument about fairness. It is a statement of terms, not an enforcement mechanism — those are two different things and only the first one is inside your control.

Where does personal use end and commercial use begin?

The line most sellers imagine is “did money change hands”, and it is not quite that. Personal use covers a buyer's own projects with no business behind them: a print for their kitchen, an invitation to their own party, a pattern on something they sew for a friend. Commercial use is anything that touches a trade — a product they sell, a logo, a menu, a social post promoting a business, a client deliverable. The awkward middle is real and it is where the disputes live: a charity fundraiser, a school, a hobbyist selling six items a year at a craft fair. None of those are obvious from the words alone.

Which is why an unqualified “commercial use allowed” is close to useless. It reads as unlimited, and a buyer who reads it that way is not being unreasonable. The scope is what makes it mean something, and this generator asks for scope in four separate places: whether the file may be modified at all, whether it may be printed onto physical products for sale, whether there is a cap on how many of those units may be produced, and how many people may work under the licence — one person, five, a whole business, or no limit. Ticking commercial use without setting those is granting a great deal more than most sellers intend. Tick the physical-products box and the unit-cap selector becomes available; leave it unticked and the cap is switched off, because a cap on units is meaningless when no units are permitted.

Why is “no resale of the file itself” the clause that matters most?

Because a digital product is perfectly copyable, the only version of your business that can be destroyed in an afternoon is the one where your source file is in circulation. Every other overstep costs you one sale. This one costs you the product. A buyer who prints your artwork on mugs is a customer using your work; a buyer who uploads your PNG bundle to another marketplace is a competitor selling your work with your own file, at whatever price they like, forever.

The wording the generator produces is deliberately wide for that reason. It covers reselling, redistributing, sharing, giving away, sublicensing and bundling; it applies to the whole file and to any part of it; and it applies whether the file has been modified or not, because “I recoloured it” is the standard defence. It also names template marketplaces and any format that lets a recipient extract the original, since the common leak is not someone selling your file directly but someone selling a template with your file embedded and extractable inside it. The related print-on-demand restriction is a separate tick for a separate reason: those platforms sit in a grey area where the buyer is not redistributing the file but the platform is reproducing it at scale, and if your product is sized and prepared for POD that is precisely the use a buyer will assume is included unless you say it is not.

Is a credit requirement worth including?

Honestly, for most craft and download products it does very little. Attribution works where the work is displayed with space for a byline — a photograph on a website, a font in a colophon, a template in a repository. It does not survive the journey onto a physical object. Nobody prints “artwork by Willow & Fern Studio” on the inside of a tote bag, and if they did you would have no way of knowing whether they had, no way of checking a thousand buyers, and no realistic proportionate response to the one who did not. A term that cannot be observed and would not be pursued is decoration.

It costs nothing to include, and some sellers keep it as a polite signal rather than an obligation. If that is the intent, the generator's unticked wording says so directly — no credit or attribution is required, though it is always welcome — which is a more honest sentence than a requirement everyone quietly ignores. Where attribution genuinely does earn its place is a digital product whose buyers are themselves publishing online, since the credit line is then a real referral channel and the buyer is used to giving one.

What can a licence not do?

Four things, and being clear-eyed about them is more useful than a longer document.

• It cannot stop determined copying. Anyone willing to ignore the terms can ignore them, and no clause changes the fact that a file you sold is a file you no longer physically control. What the licence changes is what happens next, not whether it happens.
• It cannot substitute for a lawyer. A generated document is a readable starting point built from your own answers. Whether any given clause binds a particular buyer depends on how the terms were presented at purchase and on the consumer law that applies where each of you is — neither of which a web page knows anything about.
• It cannot override the marketplace's terms. Where your licence and the platform's seller policy disagree, the platform's policy governs the sale made on that platform. This bites most often on refunds and on what the platform grants itself over your uploaded files, and it is worth reading your marketplace's policy before writing terms that contradict it.
• It cannot remove a consumer's statutory rights. The generator's refund section deliberately ends by saying that nothing in it removes any statutory right the buyer has under the law that applies to them, because in many countries a term that tried to would simply be void — and an obviously void clause weakens the credibility of the rest of the document.

Where should the licence file live?

Two places, and doing both costs nothing. The first is inside the download itself, as a plain .txt sitting next to the artwork — that is what the download button here produces, with Windows line endings so it opens correctly in Notepad and wrapped to a readable column width so it does not arrive as one enormous line. The second is as its own file slot in the listing, so the terms are attached to the purchase record rather than only to a folder the buyer may unzip once and never open again.

Slot arithmetic matters more than it sounds on Etsy, where as of July 2026 a listing holds a maximum of five files at up to 20 MB each. A licence text file is a rounding error against that 20 MB, but it does consume one of the five slots, which is the constraint that actually bites when a bundle is already using four. Sellers who run into this generally either zip the artwork to free a slot or fold the licence into the download package instead of giving it its own — and if it is the 20 MB per-file ceiling rather than the file count causing the problem, our 20 MB file fitter is the tool for that half of it. File names are visible to buyers and capped at 70 characters, so a name like botanical-line-art-licence.txt does more work than licence.txt, especially for shops that sell personal and commercial versions of the same product and need the right document to end up in the right download.

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