If your files come with strings attached - photographer contracts, stock licenses, model releases - you've probably been tracking them in a spreadsheet. Or in someone's head. Copyrights moves that information onto the assets themselves, so the rules travel with the file instead of living somewhere your team has to remember to check.
Turning it on
Copyrights is set up per workspace and starts switched off. Go to Settings → Copyrights and turn on Enable copyright management for this workspace.
Once it's on, copyright fields appear on your assets, expiry warnings start showing, and your download rules apply. Turning it back off hides all of it again without losing what you've entered.
Your copyright fields
Three fields are ready the moment you enable it:
- Expiration Date - the date the rights run out. This one drives every warning and download rule, so it can't be renamed or removed.
- Source - where the asset came from. Purchased, Licensed, In-house, or User-generated.
- Allowed Channels - where the asset may be used. Social media, Website, Print, Email, or Paid ads.
You can edit the options on Source and Allowed Channels, and add fields of your own with + Add field. Each new field is one of four types: single select, multi-select, free text, or date. Licensor, credit line, and allowed territories are common additions.
Setting your expiration policy
Under Expiration policy you decide how far ahead to warn, and what happens at each stage:
- Warn when rights expire within - how many days ahead an asset counts as expiring soon. The default is 30.
- When rights have expired - block the download, warn before downloading, or do nothing.
- When rights are expiring soon - the same three choices, applied earlier.
Out of the box, expired assets are blocked and expiring-soon assets warn first. Whatever you choose here, expired and expiring assets are always marked visually.
Adding rights to your assets
You can fill in copyright fields in three places:
- On a single asset - open it and use the Copyright section in the details panel.
- In bulk - select the assets, then use the three-dots menu in the bulk bar. Description and rating are editable there too.
- On upload - open the advanced options in the Tag step of the upload wizard, and everything you set applies to all the files in that upload.
If an asset has no expiry - something you own outright, or shot yourself - tick Unrestricted on the expiration field and it stops raising warnings.
What your team sees
Assets carry a badge as their rights run down. Anything past its expiration date shows a red Expired marker, and anything inside your warning window shows an amber countdown. Both appear on the asset card in the grid and in the preview screen, so nobody has to open a file to find out where it stands.
When someone downloads an asset whose rights have run out, they get whatever you set in your expiration policy. If you chose to block, and they're downloading a batch or a whole collection, the blocked files are left out and everything else still comes through - one restricted asset doesn't cost them the download.
Editing copyright values is limited to admins by default. You can change who has access from your Roles & permissions settings.
Rights follow your assets everywhere
Copyright rules aren't only enforced in the app. When an assistant reaches your library through the MCP, or your own tools go through the API, files whose rights have expired come back blocked. Your assistant can't open them, share them, or pass them to another tool. What you set in Copyrights holds wherever your library turns up.
Staying ahead of expiry
The point of the warning window is to give you time to act. Filter for what's expiring soon, then decide what to renew and what to retire - before a campaign goes out with an asset you no longer have the rights to use.
Copyrights is available on all plans.
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