Licensing is an agreement in which the original creator of a piece of content agrees to let another individual or business use that content for a certain amount of time. In the digital asset management (DAM) context, licensing typically happens between a brand and another brand, or a brand and a freelance creator. Licensing agreements can save brands time and money they would’ve otherwise spent creating their own content.
While licensing content can be cheaper than creating your own, it does introduce some complexities to managing digital assets internally. The central complexity is that almost all licensing agreements have an expiration date. This means that licensed assets can only be used in a specific period of time, and that using them outside of that time is a breach of contract and could result in some legal troubles. Tracking these expiration dates and permissions is a central goal of effective digital asset management programs. Typically, these are tracked in specific metadata fields that allow your users to quickly see what can be used and what can’t. Some DAM platforms allow your team to set permissions dates that will tell the system to automatically archive out-of-date content.
