This is general information to help you ask better questions, not legal advice. Laws vary by country and situation - check with a qualified lawyer before you rely on any of it.
It is one of the most common questions in marketing: a customer posts a great photo or video of your product, so can you just repost it? The short answer is usually not without permission - and understanding why makes the fix obvious.
Who owns a customer photo or video?
By default, the person who created the content owns the copyright the moment it is captured. That is true whether they posted it publicly, tagged your brand, or used your hashtag. Posting about you does not hand you the rights - to reuse someone's media in your marketing, you generally need a license or explicit permission from them.
So the honest baseline is: the content belongs to your customer, and you are asking to borrow it.
Why a tag, a like or a hashtag is not consent
A tag is ordinary social engagement, not a transfer of rights. The same goes for a like, a comment, or entering your branded hashtag campaign - none of it, on its own, grants you a commercial license. Even crediting the creator, while good practice, is not a substitute for permission; a credit is not a license.
There is a second, practical problem. Even when someone does say yes in a DM or a comment, that "record" is fragile:
- It rarely specifies what you can do - organic post only, or ads too? Can you edit it? For how long? In which countries?
- It is tied to a platform's inbox, not your own system, so it is hard to find and prove months later if anyone objects.
A thumbs-up in DMs feels like a yes, but it is a weak thing to rely on when the terms are unclear and the evidence is a screenshot.
"But it is public" - what platform terms actually grant
When someone posts to Instagram or TikTok, they grant the platform a broad license to operate and promote its service (and to sublicense to partners the platform itself chooses). That license runs to the platform - not to you. "Public" is not the same as "licensed for anyone to reuse." A brand lifting another user's post off the feed is not covered by those terms.
Platform terms also change, and some now describe expanding how public content can be sublicensed to a platform's own marketing partners - which is exactly the kind of shifting, murky territory that makes a clean, first-party permission the safer path.
Organic repost vs paid ad - two different questions
This is the distinction most brands miss. Permission to reshare something on your feed does not automatically let you run it as a paid ad, put it on a product page, or crop it into a billboard. Paid and commercial use is broader, carries more risk, and usually needs:
- Explicit paid-usage rights, ideally scoped and time-limited.
- A model release for anyone recognisable in the media - a separate layer from copyright, covering the person's privacy and publicity rights (and for anyone identifiable, data-protection rules like GDPR can apply too).
- Clear disclosure (for example #ad) if the content was incentivised.
Treat "can I reshare this?" and "can I advertise with this?" as two separate yeses.
The people in the frame
Copyright is about who made the media. Privacy and publicity rights are about who is in it. If a recognisable person - or a child, or someone's home - appears in a photo or video, you may need their consent as well, especially for ads. "The customer sent it to me" does not cover the friend standing next to them.
The clean fix: get permission at the source
Every shortcut above is a workaround for the same missing thing: a clear, recorded, scoped permission tied to the specific asset. The reliable way to have that is to capture it when the media is submitted, rather than chasing it afterward.
When a customer uploads photos and videos through a submission form with an opt-in consent checkbox, the license is granted and recorded against each asset at that moment - creator, scope, date and terms attached to the file itself. There is no later chase, no DM screenshot to dig up, and the audit trail exists by construction. That is the whole idea behind UGC rights management done at submission, and it is how Jam is built: collect customer media with rights granted at upload, keep it in one searchable library with its rights status attached, and publish to your social channels - knowing what is cleared before you post.
If you want the practical side, see how to ask customers for photos and videos - the same ask that gets you the media is the best place to get the rights.
Again: general information, not legal advice - talk to a lawyer about your specific situation and jurisdiction.