JSON2VIDEO Documentation Content ownership & usage rights
Who owns the videos you render, what you can do with them, and what you are responsible for.
This page summarises the position in plain language. The binding text is the Developer API Terms of Use; where the two differ, the Terms control.
The short answer
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Who owns the video I render? | You do, on every plan. |
| Can I use it commercially? | On a paid plan, yes, without restriction. On the free plan, no — see The free plan is different. |
| Will there be a watermark? | Possibly on the free plan — we may apply one at any time. Paid plans always render clean. |
| Do I need to credit JSON2Video? | No. There is no attribution requirement on any plan. |
| Does JSON2Video claim any rights over my videos? | No ownership. Only the limited licence needed to run the render and deliver the file to you. |
| Does JSON2Video reuse my content? | No. Not for marketing, not to train models, not for anything else — unless you explicitly agree. |
| Is my ownership unconditional? | No. You only ever get out what you had the right to put in — see The one real limit. |
What you provide stays yours
The assets you send us — images, video clips, audio, fonts, text, templates, and anything you upload to your Media library — remain entirely yours. Uploading a file to JSON2Video transfers no ownership.
To operate the service we need a narrow, practical licence over those files: permission to store, copy, transcode, cache, and transmit them, strictly to produce the render you asked for and deliver it back to you. That licence exists for no other purpose. It ends when the files do, on the schedule in File retention.
What you generate is yours
As between you and JSON2Video, every rendered video belongs to you, on every plan. On a paid plan you may publish it, sell it, edit it, license it onward, put it behind a paywall, or use it in paid advertising, with no watermark and no attribution. (The free plan grants ownership too, but restricts what you may do with the video — see the next section.)
Concretely, JSON2Video will not:
- claim ownership or co-ownership of your renders;
- use your videos, uploads, or templates in its own marketing, demos, or public galleries;
- use your content to develop, train, or improve machine-learning models;
- share your content with anyone else, except the providers strictly needed to produce the render (see below) or where the law compels us.
If we ever want to feature something you made, we will ask you first.
The free plan is different
The free plan exists so you can evaluate and learn the platform. Videos rendered on it come with two conditions that paid plans do not have:
- They may carry a JSON2Video watermark. Whether one is applied is decided automatically from your plan at render time — there is no JSON property that controls it, and the deprecated
draftflag does nothing. We may start or stop applying it at any time. Where one is present you may not remove, crop, obscure, or otherwise defeat it. - They are for non-commercial use only. Personal projects, learning, and internal evaluation are fine. Selling the video, using it in advertising or promotion, publishing it on a monetised channel, or delivering it to a client is not. This applies whether or not a watermark is present.
These conditions travel with the video. Upgrading later does not retroactively clear a video you already rendered on the free plan — but re-rendering the same movie on a paid plan gives you a clean, unrestricted version. That is usually a few credits and the simplest fix.
Every paid plan removes both conditions. See Plans.
The one real limit
Your rights in the output can never exceed your rights in the input. Rendering does not launder licences. If a scene contains a stock clip, a licensed font, a music track, a brand logo, or a person's face or voice, the terms attached to that material still apply to the finished video, exactly as they did before.
This is the practical checklist:
- Stock media — check whether your licence covers the use you have in mind. Many "free" libraries permit personal but not commercial use, or require attribution.
- Fonts — a font served over a URL still needs a licence that allows embedding and redistribution.
- Music — a track cleared for one YouTube channel is usually not cleared for a client's advertising campaign.
- People — using someone's name, face, or voice needs their consent. This is not optional, and it is one of the categories the Terms prohibit outright.
- Brands — trademarks and product imagery you do not own need permission.
You are solely responsible for holding these rights. Section 3(f) of the Terms puts it directly: you must have "all rights, licenses, consents, releases, and lawful basis required for such content and its intended use."
Third-party providers follow their own terms
Some elements are produced by an external provider rather than by JSON2Video — most visibly the text-to-speech voices behind the voice element, whether billed through your JSON2Video credits or through your own Connection.
For those components, the provider's licence terms travel with the output. A synthetic voice, for example, may carry restrictions on the kind of content it may narrate. If you brought your own provider account through a Connection, the agreement you signed with that provider governs. See Third-party integrations.
JSON2Video does not add restrictions of its own on top — but it cannot remove the provider's either.
What you may not create
Ownership does not mean anything goes. Section 3(f) of the Terms lists content that may not be created through the platform under any circumstances. The categories that account for nearly every real case:
- synthetic impersonation of a real person — deepfakes, face swaps, lip-sync manipulation;
- any use of a real person's name, likeness, or voice without their verifiable consent;
- sexual or suggestive content, and absolutely anything sexualising minors;
- deceptive political content, disinformation, and fabricated statements attributed to real people or organisations;
- impersonation of a brand, fraud, scams, phishing, and fake reviews or testimonials;
- hate speech, harassment, incitement to violence, and content promoting self-harm;
- anything infringing someone else's copyright, trademark, or other rights;
- anything unlawful in a jurisdiction where it is made, distributed, or watched.
Section 3(f) is the authoritative and longer list. We may refuse, remove, or take down content and suspend accounts over it, without prior notice.
Where your videos live
Ownership and hosting are separate questions. Owning a render does not turn our storage into your CDN:
- A render URL is a pickup point, valid for 7 days. Download the file, or push it straight to your own storage with an export destination. Render URLs must not be embedded in or linked from public sites (SLA §4.2).
- Media library URLs are the exception: they are stable and meant to be referenced from your own renders and properties.
Full detail in File retention.
The legal documents
- Developer API Terms of Use — the binding agreement. Ownership is §4; prohibited content is §3(f); file storage is §3(g).
- Service Level Agreement — availability, support response times, and the hosting restriction.
- Privacy Policy — how we handle personal data.
Questions the pages above do not answer: contact us.