Contributing items to Envato Elements
The new, high-quality world of items on Envato Elements continues! It’s never been more important for you to make sure your items don’t expose you to the risk of legal action under intellectual property and related laws. This refresher will help you stay in touch with our expectations when it comes to the items being sold on Envato Elements. It also summarises our approach for detecting non-compliant items and disabling accounts which break the rules.
Regular Intellectual Property Checks
To give our subscribers confidence in the integrity of our collection, our team regularly checks the Envato Elements library to make sure it is free of non-compliant items. All authors can expect a section of their item portfolio to be checked. New authors or authors in categories which have historically been more likely to have issues can expect more rigorous checks in the short term.
Education & Warning
We know there are many things to consider as you prepare items for sale. Sometimes details get missed and while it is still your responsibility to be across all the requirements, our first step in any identified issue is to let you know what we’ve discovered. We’ll always provide links to relevant guidelines as well as links to items we’ve identified as being in violation. If we choose to issue a warning, it’s important that you act quickly to correct any identified issues to avoid escalation to action on our part (as outlined below).
Consequences
This new approach is dependent on a relationship of trust. We’re looking for the highest quality authors who have demonstrated their ability to meet our standards without ongoing supervision. Authors who are found to have broken the rules face temporary or permanent removal of upload rights or even the disablement of their account in the event of serious non-compliance.
What do you need to know?
Intellectual Property and Copyright
Respect for others’ intellectual property continues to be one of our core values. It goes without saying that your items must be original and not taken from elsewhere. This includes third party assets like placeholder images. You must make sure that you have properly licensed any assets you are using within your items.
You might find this flowchart helpful in understanding what we consider acceptable when it comes to using intellectual property and copyright of third parties.
Model and property releases
You must obtain and hold on to model releases in respect of any items which include recognisable images of people, and property releases in respect of any items which include identifiable buildings. For more information, refer to our guidelines.
If we ask you to provide a release for a particular item and you can’t provide it, we may choose to remove problematic items from your portfolio, limit your upload rights or even disable your account.
Trademarks and real-world items
We do not accept items that contain trademarks, as they could potentially be used in a way that causes confusion as to the source of certain products or services — and may, therefore, infringe the rights of trademark owners. High-quality digital removal of trademarks from items is acceptable.
Additionally, even if the trademark is not visible, a recognisable product cannot be the focus of an item. This is because there may be copyright in the design of a product which is infringed by depicting the product in an image.
There are some very limited exceptions depending on the item type which you can read about in our guidelines on trademark use and real world products in items.
General Considerations
It is your responsibility to ensure you use the correct legal arrangements and consents for your projects, and that they protect both yourself and models you work with or the owner of any private property used, including in relation to applicable privacy and personal data laws.