Video usage licence: term, territory, media and scope

You paid for a video two years ago. Now you want to run it as a paid ad, pull a 30-second cut for the trade show booth, or put it on a new website. The answer is not in the invoice. It is in the usage licence, and more precisely in the limits that licence is allowed to carry: territory, medium, sector of the market and scope. Add the term, and you have the grid for reading your own document tonight.

This page describes a public rule and what a buyer should have written down. Ownership, meaning who actually holds the copyright in the footage, is a different question and it is answered on the page about who owns the raw video footage. Here we are talking only about the shape and the lifespan of the permission you received.

The Act lets a supplier cut your permission down

The Copyright Act starts with a condition of form. An assignment or a grant of an interest in copyright is valid only if it is in writing and signed by the owner of the right concerned. An email saying go ahead does not clear that bar, and neither does a purchase order.

The same subsection then says the thing that carries this page. The owner may grant an interest in the right by licence, and that licence may be limited by territory, by medium, by sector of the market, or by other limits on its scope. A cut-down licence is therefore not a supplier trick. It is a form the Act expressly contemplates, and it is the default shape of the deal until the contract says otherwise.

The consequence fits in one sentence: your company holds exactly what the document grants, and nothing beyond it. Silence does not work in your favour. It creates a grey zone, and that zone always surfaces on the day someone wants to spend money behind the video.

For how long

The term is the most expensive limit and the quietest one, because it is invisible on screen. The underlying right, meanwhile, runs for a very long time: the Copyright Act provides that copyright subsists for the life of the author and until the end of the seventieth year following the year of death.

The right in your footage will outlive the campaign, your relationship with the supplier, and probably the career of whoever signed. Your permission lasts exactly as long as the paper says it does. Anything left unsettled in writing stays unsettled for decades, and the only way to settle it later is to renegotiate with someone who no longer has any reason to give you a price.

A typical case. A plant in the Beauce has a corporate film produced in 2024 and puts it on the home page. By 2026 that film is its best performing creative in paid advertising. The moment a company decides to scale spend behind a video is exactly the moment a vague licence gets expensive: the asset that is working is the one you are not allowed to keep running.

Where, in which media, for which market

This is the most useful point on the page. A licence limited to web use does not obviously cover paid advertising. The company website and a sponsored campaign are two different uses, and nothing guarantees that a supplier meant to cover the second when he wrote the first. In the same way, a licence granted for one campaign does not cover the next one. Those two sentences get expensive when nobody raised them in advance.

Medium is the limit buyers forget most often, because video travels on its own. The film leaves the home page, lands in the sales deck, then on the booth screen at the industrial trade show, then in a paid feed. Each of those places is a medium, and each one can be inside or outside the grant.

Territory matters as soon as you sell elsewhere. A Quebec City manufacturer that signs a distributor in Ontario or in the American Northeast is suddenly publishing into a territory nobody discussed. Sector of the market separates uses you assume are identical: showing the film to a prime contractor in a meeting, attaching it to a bid, or publishing it openly. Scope, finally, settles the recuts. A 45-second version pulled from a 3-minute film is a modification, and you need to know whether it is allowed.

Why a licence has to name the acts it permits

Copyright is not one block. It is a set of separate acts the owner controls one by one: producing or reproducing the work in any material form, performing or publishing it in public, adapting it, making it into a cinematographic work, and communicating it to the public by telecommunication. Posting a video online and looping it on a screen in a lobby are not the same act under the Act.

That is why a serious licence names the uses instead of vaguely granting use of the material. It is also why a film is usable only for as long as its shortest component licence. Music, archive footage, a typeface, a purchased shot: each arrives with limits of its own. Your licence on the finished edit cannot be broader than those.

What to demand, and the answer that ends the conversation

You do not have to draft the contract. You need to know what it must contain so you can judge the one put in front of you. Ask that the document answer these in plain words.

• The term of the licence, and what happens to the film the day it ends.
• The media covered, named one by one, including paid advertising and the trade show screen.
• The territory, and what happens if you open a market outside Quebec.
• The right to have new cutdowns produced from the existing material.
• The limits attached to third-party elements inside the film, music first.
• The signature of the owner of the right, on the document itself.

One answer should end the conversation: it is standard, do not worry about it. There is no enforceable standard here, there is only your document. A supplier who refuses to name a term has named one, and it is not yours. A supplier who explains his limits and writes them down gives you something you can evaluate, and these clauses explain a real share of the gap between two video quotes.

My own position is published on the Signal programme page: it includes a lifetime content licence with no time limit. That is a licence, not an assignment of copyright, and I never present it as anything else. It settles the limit that costs money in practice, the expiry date. The same logic applies to stills, covered on the page about corporate photography.

When this does not apply to you

A company that will publish its video once on its own site and never put a dollar of advertising behind it has almost no exposure here. The film sits on a page, nobody recuts it, it does not travel. In that case, negotiating hard for a very broad licence spends your time, and sometimes your money, on a right you will never exercise. Put your negotiating effort somewhere else, on what gets filmed for instance.

The threshold is crossed the day three things become true at once: the video works, you want to spend behind it, and somebody asks for a version different from the original. That is when the licence stops being a formality. The rest of the production logic sits on the video and content production page.

This page describes public rules. It is not legal advice. Have your own counsel confirm your situation before you publish.

Sources

• Copyright Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-42, section 13 (ownership, assignment, licence), French consolidation, Justice Laws Website, https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/fra/lois/C-42/page-3.html, fetched 23 September 2026, Act current to 3 September 2026.
• Copyright Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-42, section 6 (term of copyright), French consolidation, Justice Laws Website, https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/fra/lois/C-42/page-2.html, fetched 23 September 2026, Act current to 3 September 2026.
• Copyright Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-42, subsection 3(1) (nature of copyright), French consolidation, Justice Laws Website, https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/fra/lois/C-42/TexteComplet.html, fetched 23 September 2026, Act current to 3 September 2026.