What is a licence agreement?

A licence agreement is the terms under which you can use a logo, or graphic or photo. See ours here.

It doesn’t mean you own it, but just that you can use it. Ownership is the copyright, or ‘intellectual property’.

It is a common misconception that any graphics or images on the internet are in the public domain and therefore free to use. This is not the case – somebody created that graphic, or took that photo, and in law, all intellectual property automatically remains with them.

People use pictures from the Internet all the time without the owners permission, and a lot of professionally taken pictures you see on websites are the property of stock libraries who charge a fee for the licence agreement to use their images.

These stock libraries are getting very smart in protecting this income too – they employ teams of people to search the internet and clever artificial intelligence technology to find unlicensed usage online by automatically and quickly scanning websites for hidden tags in their images.

So BEWARE! There are an increasing number of cases of unsuspecting users receiving huge demands out of the blue for damages for unlicensed usage because they didn’t realise what they were doing. And ignorance is no defence either – it’s your business, so you are legally responsible for your website and any images on it, including your logo, even if you didn’t create it. Just do an internet search on ‘Getty demand letter’, and you’ll see what we mean. Always check with your designer and find out if they drew it themselves, or where they got the graphic from and what licensing is in place.

Don’t fall into this trap! Our logos are created by us and if you buy all 10 editions, we will even assign the copyright to you free of charge too.