A brand runs a creator campaign, gets fifteen good pieces of content, and six weeks later wants to put one of them on a shelf talker and one of them behind paid media in Australia. Somebody asks whether that is allowed, and the room goes quiet.
This is the most expensive thing brands get wrong in customer and creator content, and it is entirely avoidable.
The default position is not what people assume
Copyright in a photograph or a video belongs to the person who created it, from the moment it is created. That is the starting point in New Zealand and in most markets, and nothing about a brand having paid for the product changes it.
So unless a brand has been granted rights in writing, the position is that the customer owns the content and the brand owns nothing.
Four things people mistake for ownership
A tag is not a licence. Somebody tagging your brand is not granting you the right to use their photograph in an advertisement.
A reshare is not a licence. Resharing to a story using a platform's own tool operates within that platform's terms. It does not give you a file you can put on a billboard.
Platform terms are not your terms. The licence a user grants a platform is a licence to that platform. It is not transferable to advertisers.
Payment is not, on its own, transfer. Paying somebody for content buys whatever the agreement says it buys. If the agreement is silent, a court will not read a transfer into it because money changed hands.
The three positions you can actually be in
1. A limited licence
The most common outcome of an influencer campaign. The brand may use the content in defined places, for a period specified in the agreement, sometimes only on the creator's own channels. When the window closes, the asset comes down.
This is why so many brands cannot boost the post they paid for. Organic usage was licensed; paid usage was not.
2. A broad licence
Rights across paid, organic, retail, print and internal use, usually in perpetuity or for a long fixed term. The creator keeps copyright, and the brand can do what it needs to do. This is the practical position for most content programmes, and it is what we clear.
3. Assignment
Copyright transfers outright, in writing. Rare, more expensive, and almost never necessary. A broad licence covers what a brand actually does with the asset.
The person in the frame is a separate question
Copyright covers the footage. It does not cover the person in it.
Using somebody's image and likeness in advertising needs their consent, and that includes everyone who appears as well as the person holding the camera. A child in the background, a flatmate at the table, a neighbour over the fence: each one is a consent you either have or do not have.
Personal information collected along the way sits under the Privacy Act 2020, including principle 12, which governs any disclosure of New Zealand personal information overseas.
How we handle it
Rights are agreed and cleared as part of the campaign, before anything is published. Full content rights pass to the brand, licensed for paid, organic, retail and internal use.
The reason for doing it in that order is practical rather than legal. Once performance evidence is available, you can decide what to put paid amplification behind without reopening the rights negotiation.
What to ask before you sign anything
- What exactly is licensed: paid, organic, retail, print, internal, and in which markets?
- For how long, and what happens at the end of it?
- Can we edit, crop or subtitle it, and can we run it from the creator's handle?
- Who has consented to appear, and is that recorded?
- Where is the evidence file for any claim made in the content?
That last one is a Fair Trading Act question rather than a copyright one. Section 12A prohibits unsubstantiated representations, so the substantiation for anything claimed in the content needs to exist at the time it is made, and it needs to be findable later.
The wider model is on the customer-generated content page, and what we reject, and why covers what happens to content that cannot be cleared.