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Do You Need a Commercial Licence for Your Digital Products?

Two licences matter when you sell a digital product: the one your tools give you, and the one you give your buyer. Here's what each has to say.

Gizella Nagyne Palinkas

9/11/20268 min read

There is no single "commercial licence" you go out and buy. There are two licences in every digital product — the licence your design tools and fonts grant you, which decides what you are allowed to make and sell, and the licence you grant your buyer, which decides what they are allowed to do with it once they have paid.

Almost every licensing mess in this business comes from confusing those two. This article separates them and gives you the wording for both.

Licence one: what your tools let you sell

Your design tool's licence is not a formality. It is the document that decides whether the thing you are about to list is allowed to exist.

Canva's Content License Agreement is the clearest example, because so many templates and printables start there. It draws a hard line around redistribution. The agreement prohibits you from:

"sub-license, re-sell, rent, lend, assign, gift or otherwise transfer or distribute the Content"
"Use or display the Content on a standalone basis on websites or other venues designed to induce… sale, license or other distribution"
using content "in a manner that competes with Canva's business including… displaying content in any format for download or export"

and from incorporating content "in any product that results in a re-distribution or re-use of the content or is otherwise made available in a manner such that a person can extract… reproduce the content."

Read that last one slowly, because it is the one that catches template sellers. A design where the buyer receives a flattened PDF is a very different object, licensing-wise, from a design where the buyer receives an editable file containing extractable stock photos and graphics.

The agreement also splits its own content into two tiers with different rules. Free Content may be downloaded "on a standalone basis" and used "in templates for websites… for distribution and/or sale to third parties." Pro Content is licensed for use "in a single Canva Design" and explicitly may not be downloaded "as a standalone item."

What this means in practice: if you sell editable templates, the safest build uses your own layout and typography plus elements you are separately licensed to redistribute — not premium stock elements pulled from inside the editor. Check the licence for every tool in your stack, not just the main one. The rules differ by tool and by tier, and they change.

Licence two: fonts, the one nobody checks

Fonts are separately licensed from everything else, and a font licence that is fine for a poster can be wrong for a template.

The SIL Open Font License — the licence behind a very large share of freely available web fonts — permits broad use: "You can use them in books, posters, artwork, logos, and on websites, even make 3D objects with the outlines — no acknowledgement is required." It allows bundling into software under conditions, and allows modification, though projects often use Reserved Font Names, meaning a modified version may not keep the original name.

What that does not do is make every font free for every use. A commercial font from a foundry usually licenses a specific number of users, a specific number of page views, or a specific kind of embedding, and "I bought it once" does not automatically cover a template that ships the font file to a thousand buyers.

The rule to work by: if your buyer receives a file that contains a font, you need a licence that permits distributing that font. If they only receive an image or a flattened PDF of text set in that font, you usually do not. Check, per font, before you build.

Who owns work you paid someone to make

If you hired a designer, an illustrator or a virtual assistant, ownership does not follow the invoice by default.

UK Intellectual Property Office guidance is direct about it: "the author or creator of the work is usually the first owner of any copyright in it." For commissioned work specifically, "the first legal owner of copyright is the person or organisation that created the work and not you the commissioner, unless you otherwise agree it in writing." Freelancers working under a contract for services typically keep copyright in what they produce "unless there is a contractual agreement to the contrary." Without a written agreement, a commissioner may be left with an implied licence to use the work rather than ownership of it.

So: get it in writing, before the work starts, in one sentence. Something like — All intellectual property in the work created under this agreement is assigned to [your business name] on final payment. That is the whole fix, and it costs nothing at the point you do it.

When you don't need a licence at all

Some things are out of copyright and free to use. Far fewer than the internet believes.

UK copyright durations, per gov.uk, run like this:

Written, dramatic, musical and artistic work: 70 years after the author's death
Sound and music recording: 70 years from when it's first published
Films: 70 years after the death of the director, screenplay author and composer
Broadcasts: 50 years from when it's first broadcast
Layout of published editions: 25 years from when it's first published

Note the shape of that list. "Seventy years after the author's death" is not seventy years after publication — for a writer who published young and lived long, it can be well over a century. And note the last row: the layout of a published edition carries its own 25-year clock, separate from the text inside it. A scan of an old book is not automatically free just because the words are.

This also cuts the other way, in your favour. Your own product is protected from the moment you create it. You do not register anything, and you do not need a © symbol for it to count.

Licence three: the one you give your buyer

This is the one most sellers never write, and it is the one that decides whether your product can be legally resold out from under you.

Three tiers cover almost everything a small digital shop needs. Write them in plain English, put them on the sales page and inside the file, and be consistent across every product.

1. Personal use. One buyer, their own use, no reselling, no sharing the file, no commercial use of the output. Suits printables, planners, journals, flashcards.

2. Commercial use. The buyer may use the product in their own business and may sell the things they make with it — but may not sell, share or redistribute the product itself. Suits templates, mockups, graphics packs. This is the tier most template buyers actually want, and the one worth being explicit about, because buyers ask before they buy.

3. Extended or resale rights. The buyer may modify and resell the product itself, sometimes under conditions. Only offer this deliberately. Once you sell resale rights, you are competing with your own buyers, and you cannot take it back from anyone who already bought it.

A workable plain-English block looks like this:

Licence: You may use this file in your own business and sell what you create with it. You may not resell, share, redistribute or give away the file itself, or any editable version of it. You may not claim authorship of the original design. One licence covers one person or one business.

Three sentences and a scope line. That is enough for most shops, and enormously better than nothing.

The five-minute audit

Do this once per product, before it goes live.

Tool check. Open the licence page for every tool the product was built in. Does it permit distributing this output, in this format, to a third party?
Font check. List every font in the file. For each, can it be redistributed inside the file the buyer receives? If unsure, flatten it or swap to an openly licensed font.
Asset check. List every photo, icon and graphic that is not yours. Same question for each.
Delivery-format check. Does the buyer get something extractable? Editable files raise the bar; flattened PDFs lower it.
Buyer licence check. Is your licence tier stated on the sales page, and included as a page inside the file itself?

If a step fails, the fix is almost always to swap the offending asset or change the delivery format — not to abandon the product.

Not legal advice

This is general information about how licensing works, drawn from the public documents linked below. It is not legal advice, and I am not a lawyer. Licensing depends on your jurisdiction, your contracts and your specific files — if a product carries real commercial risk for you, have a solicitor look at your terms.

Which licence should your product carry?

Personal use, commercial use, or extended? The wrong tier either loses you buyers who needed commercial rights, or hands away a product you meant to keep selling. The quiz below asks six questions about what you built and who buys it, and tells you which tier to write — plus the specific wording to use.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Do I need a commercial licence to sell digital products? A: Not as a single document you purchase. What you need is to confirm that each tool, font and asset you used permits you to distribute your output commercially, and then to write the licence you are granting your buyer. The first is a check you run against licence pages; the second is three sentences you write once and reuse. Most small shops need no other paperwork.

Q: Can I sell templates made in Canva? A: It depends entirely on what is inside them and what the buyer receives. Canva's Content License Agreement prohibits sub-licensing, reselling or redistributing its Content, and prohibits building products from which a person can extract and reproduce that content. Free Content and Pro Content carry different rules — Pro Content may not be downloaded as a standalone item. Read the current agreement against your specific build before listing.

Q: What's the difference between personal use and commercial use licences? A: Personal use means the buyer uses the product themselves and cannot use it to make money. Commercial use means they may use it in their own business and sell what they create with it, while still not being allowed to resell the file itself. Commercial is the tier most template and graphic buyers want. Neither tier permits reselling your original product — that is a separate, third tier.

Q: Do I need to register my copyright? A: In the UK, no. Copyright exists automatically from the moment a qualifying work is created and fixed, with no registration step and no fee. A © line and a date are useful as a signal to buyers but are not what creates the right. What is worth having in writing is any assignment of copyright from a freelancer who made something for you — that one does not happen by default.

Q: I hired someone to design my product. Do I own it? A: Not automatically. UK IPO guidance states that for commissioned work the first legal owner is the creator, "not you the commissioner, unless you otherwise agree it in writing." Without that written agreement you may only hold an implied licence to use the work. Add an assignment clause to every freelance brief you send — Ella Wealth Community's recommendation is to make it a standing line in your template, not a per-project decision.

Q: How long does copyright last on something I want to use? A: In the UK it varies by type of work: 70 years after the author's death for written, dramatic, musical and artistic works; 70 years from first publication for sound recordings; 50 years from first broadcast for broadcasts; and 25 years from first publication for the typographical layout of a published edition. Because the clock for most creative work runs from death rather than publication, "it's old" is rarely enough on its own.

Q: Where should the licence live — the sales page or the file? A: Both. On the sales page it answers the question buyers have before they pay, which removes a reason to hesitate. Inside the file it travels with the product, so it is still there when the buyer opens it eight months later or forwards it to a colleague who was never on your sales page. Use identical wording in both places.

Free: the Ultimate Canva Guide for Beginners

If most of your product decisions are happening inside Canva, this is the ground-floor version — how the editor actually works, so you are making deliberate build choices rather than discovering the constraints at listing time.

The whole thing, free. No upsell at the end → Get the Canva Guide for Beginners

Content Strategy 101 — €7

Licensing decides what you are allowed to publish. This decides what is worth publishing — a step-by-step method for planning content around the products you actually sell, in order.

Seven euros. The method, written down, in order → Content Strategy 101 — €7