Someone makes you a workbook. You put your name on it and sell it. Then a buyer asks whether they can share it with their team, and you realise you do not actually know what you are allowed to grant.
This comes up constantly and it is worth ten minutes of clarity. What follows is general information, not legal advice — for anything contested, ask a solicitor.
The default is not what people assume
In the UK, copyright in a commissioned work generally belongs to the person who created it, not the person who paid for it — unless a contract says otherwise. Paying an invoice does not, on its own, transfer ownership.
Which is why the wording you are given matters far more than the price.
The four things you might actually be buying
1. A licence to use
You can use it. You may not be able to resell it, and you do not own it. Fine for something internal — a staff handbook, an internal process document.
2. A commercial licence
You can use it and sell it, keep the revenue, put your name on it. The creator retains underlying copyright but has granted you the commercial rights. For most people selling digital products, this is the thing they need, and it is what BILDARR products carry — perpetual, unlimited, no revenue share. Our licence page sets out the detail.
3. Full assignment of copyright
Ownership genuinely transfers to you. Rarer, more expensive, and needs to be in writing and signed to be effective. Worth it when the asset is central to the business — a logo, core software.
4. PLR, or private label rights
You bought the right to rebrand and resell — alongside everyone else who bought it. The file is not exclusive and never was. This is where most people get caught: they build a brand on a product that hundreds of others are selling, sometimes cheaper, sometimes free.
The questions to ask before you buy
- Is this exclusive to me, or has it been sold before? The single most important question, and the one PLR sellers answer evasively.
- Can I sell it? Get it in writing, not in a chat message.
- Can I change it? Some licences prohibit modification, which makes rebranding impossible.
- Does the licence expire? It should not. Anything time-limited on a product you intend to sell is a trap.
- What about the fonts and images inside it? Frequently overlooked. A file can be licensed to you while a font inside it is not licensed for commercial use.
- Can I sublicense to my own buyers? Matters enormously if you plan to resell rather than just use.
Where AI-generated content sits
Worth knowing, because a lot of cheap digital products are now produced this way. Purely machine-generated material with no meaningful human authorship sits awkwardly in copyright law in several jurisdictions, and may be difficult to protect. If exclusivity matters to you, ask what human work went into what you are buying. The answer tells you a great deal about the seller as well as the file.
What good looks like
A clear licence says, in plain words: what you can do, what you cannot, whether it is exclusive, whether it expires, and what happens to the underlying rights. If you cannot find that in one place before you buy, that is itself the answer.
Everything we make is produced from your brief and exists only for you. Two people ordering the same product on the same day receive two entirely different pieces of work, and each carries a perpetual commercial licence.