Good Article on What Marketers Need to Know About Commercial Use

This article is going to be worth a read for many. It's about using software to generate profit and whether that's always legal.


As marketers, we use Adobe Photoshop, Getty images, and things like Canva all the time. Still, the author asks how often we stop and ask whether it's ok to use tools when publishing emails and web content for business purposes from the direction of licensing. It's an interesting question. Many of us check licenses for images, but the meaning of 'commercial use' carries ramifications when creating all types of content. So, let's look briefly at the difference between commercial and non-commercial use (the article goes into this in greater depth):

Commercial use:

Commercial use is any activity where you use a product or service for financial reward. That could be using software to make marketing materials you go on to publish with the intention of making sales and generating revenue. The software could be for designing or creating and publishing advertisements, for instance. When you're working for or in any business, basically everything you do gets deemed commercial - so you need a make sure you own the correct licensing agreement for any tools you use. Software companies include licensing information in their 'Terms of Use' website sections.

Non-commercial use:

Non-commercial use is anything that doesn't involve making money. School projects, making gifts for family, decorating your house all fall under non-commercial activities. Because you're not going to charge anyone for a service or product, you don't need to worry about commercial use in such instances. Even using brand logos in these circumstances is ok - whereas, you wouldn't be allowed to use brand logos on a product you'd created to sell.

Limited commercial use

The author also looks at the concept of 'limited commercial use,' which is somewhat of a gray area. It basically limits commercial product quantities when using brand logos and tools like design software. So, you could use a Getty image for a print run of 5,000 if the agreement stated for an image had a limited commercial use clause for that amount.