UGC Rights Management: Using Customer Content Legally and Ethically

Your customers are creating valuable content — photos of your products in their homes, video reviews on their phones, Instagram posts showing off their purchases. This user-generated content is some of the most powerful social proof available to your Shopify store. But using it on your website, in ads, and across your marketing channels requires something most store owners overlook: proper rights management.

Using customer content without the right permissions exposes your business to legal risk, damages customer trust, and can result in costly takedown demands. On the other hand, building a proper rights management process protects your business and actually strengthens customer relationships by showing that you respect their contribution.

This is not legal advice — consult an attorney for your specific situation. This is practical guidance for Shopify store owners who want to use customer content responsibly, legally, and ethically.

What Rights Do You Actually Need?

Before you can figure out how to get permission, you need to understand what permission you need. Not all content usage requires the same level of rights.

Display Rights

The most basic right: permission to show the customer's content on your website. This covers displaying a photo review on a product page, embedding a video review, or showing a customer's photo in a UGC gallery. Display rights are the minimum you need for any on-site use.

Modification Rights

Permission to alter the content in some way. This includes cropping photos to fit your layout, adding text overlays, adjusting brightness or color balance, creating thumbnails, or trimming video clips. If your display format requires any changes to the original content — and it almost certainly does — you need modification rights.

Distribution Rights

Permission to share the content beyond your own website. This covers reposting customer photos on your social media accounts, including customer content in email marketing campaigns, or featuring reviews in printed materials. Distribution rights are broader than display rights because the content leaves your owned platform.

Sublicensing Rights

Permission to allow third parties to use the content. This becomes relevant when you work with advertising platforms (running customer photos in Facebook ads), marketplace listings (using customer photos on Amazon), or media coverage (a publication wants to feature your customer content). Sublicensing is the broadest right and the one most store owners forget to secure.

Advertising Rights

A specific subset worth calling out separately: permission to use customer content in paid advertising. Many customers are comfortable with their photo appearing on your product page but would be surprised or uncomfortable seeing their face in a Facebook ad served to strangers. Advertising rights should be explicitly obtained, not assumed as part of general display rights.

How to Get the Rights You Need

There are several mechanisms for securing content rights, each with different strengths and formality levels.

Review Form Terms of Service

The most scalable approach is to include content licensing terms in your review submission form. When a customer submits a review with photos or video through your store, they agree to terms that grant you the rights you need.

Your review submission terms should cover:

Grant of license. The customer grants your company a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to use, display, reproduce, modify, and distribute the submitted content.
Permitted uses. Specify where the content may appear: your website, social media, email marketing, advertising, and any other channels you use.
Duration. Typically perpetual (for as long as you operate), or until the customer requests removal.
Modification rights. Explicit permission to crop, resize, overlay text, adjust color, create thumbnails, and otherwise adapt the content for different display formats and platforms.
No compensation. Clarify that the license is granted without additional compensation beyond any review incentive offered.
Ownership acknowledgment. State that the customer retains ownership of their content but grants you a license to use it.

This last point is important. You are not claiming ownership of the customer's content — you are asking for permission to use it. The customer can still post their photos on their own social media, share them with other brands, or do anything else they want with their own content.

The terms should be visible and accessible at the point of submission. A link to your full content usage terms with a clear summary — something like "By submitting, you grant us permission to display your review and photos on our website and marketing channels" — is the standard approach.

Explicit Permission Requests

For content that was not submitted through your review form — social media posts, tagged photos, content you discover through hashtag searches — you need to request permission directly.

A straightforward permission request looks like this:

"Hi [name], we love your post featuring [product]. Would you be okay with us sharing your photo on our website and social media? You would be credited as the original creator. Here is a link to our content usage terms: [link]"

Key elements of an effective permission request:

Be specific. Identify which content you want to use.
Be transparent. Tell them where and how you plan to use it.
Offer credit. Attribution is both legally prudent and ethically right.
Provide your terms. Link to or attach your content usage policy.
Get written confirmation. A DM saying "yes, go for it" is technically written consent, but a more formal confirmation is better. Some brands use a brief online form that the customer fills out.

Keep a record of every permission granted. Screenshot the conversation, save the email, or maintain a permissions database. If a question ever arises about whether you had permission to use specific content, you want documentation.

Social Media Platform Permissions

Content posted on Instagram, TikTok, and other social platforms comes with its own layer of complexity. When someone posts on Instagram, they grant Instagram a license to display that content, but they do not grant random brands the right to download and repost it.

Embedding vs downloading. Most social platforms allow you to embed public posts on your website using their official embed functionality. This is generally permissible because the content stays on the platform's servers and the embed includes attribution and a link back to the original post. Downloading the photo or video and re-uploading it to your own servers is different — that requires direct permission from the creator.

Tagging is not permission. A customer tagging your brand in a post is showing you the content, not granting you rights to use it. Treat tags as an invitation to request permission, not as permission itself.

Hashtag campaigns. If you run a branded hashtag campaign (like #MyBrandStyle), include clear terms explaining that using the hashtag grants you permission to feature the content. Post these terms in your bio, on your website, and in the campaign launch posts. Even then, it is good practice to reach out individually before featuring someone's content.

What You Can and Cannot Do With Customer Content

Even with proper rights in place, there are boundaries to how you should use customer content.

Generally Acceptable (With Proper Rights)

Display customer photos and videos on product pages
Feature customer content in email newsletters and marketing campaigns
Repost customer photos on your brand's social media accounts with attribution
Use customer photos in Facebook, Instagram, and Google Shopping ads (if your terms explicitly cover advertising)
Crop, resize, and adjust customer photos for different display formats
Create collages or compilations of multiple customer photos
Use customer content in printed materials like packaging inserts or catalogs

Generally Not Acceptable (Even With Broad Rights)

Altering customer content to change its meaning (for example, editing a 3-star review photo to appear alongside a 5-star rating)
Using customer content in a context that implies endorsement of something they did not endorse
Continuing to use content after a customer requests removal
Using identifiable customer images in sensitive or controversial contexts
Selling customer content to third parties (unless your terms explicitly allow this, which they generally should not)
Using children's images without explicit parental consent
Removing watermarks or attribution that the customer included

The Gray Area

Some uses fall into a gray area where the law may permit it but ethics suggest caution:

Using a customer's photo significantly out of context (for example, using a photo from a skincare review in an ad for a different product line)
Featuring a customer's content much more prominently than they might expect (for example, a billboard-sized use when they submitted a website review)
Continuing to use content from a customer who has since had a negative experience with your brand

When in doubt, ask. A quick message to the customer costs nothing and prevents problems.

GDPR and Privacy Considerations

If you sell to customers in the European Union (and most Shopify stores do, even if unintentionally), GDPR adds requirements beyond content rights.

Personal Data in Reviews

Customer reviews contain personal data: names, photos, video of faces, sometimes location information or health-related details. Under GDPR, you need a lawful basis for processing this data. For review content, legitimate interest or consent are the most common bases.

Right to Erasure

GDPR gives individuals the right to request deletion of their personal data. If a customer requests that you remove their review and associated content, you must comply. This means:

Remove the review from your website
Delete the photos and videos from your servers
Remove the content from any marketing materials where it is still in active use
Remove it from your social media posts (or update them to remove the customer's content)

You do not necessarily need to scrub it from historical email campaigns that have already been sent, but you should remove it from any templates or campaigns that will be sent in the future.

Consent Records

GDPR requires that you can demonstrate consent was given. Maintain records of when and how each customer consented to your content usage terms. If you use a review form with terms, log the timestamp and version of the terms that were in effect when the review was submitted. If you obtained permission via direct message, save the conversation.

Age Verification

Be cautious with content that may involve minors. If a customer photo includes children (common in children's clothing, toys, and family products), additional care is needed. Some jurisdictions require parental consent for using images of minors, regardless of whether the parent submitted the content.

Handling Takedown Requests

Even with proper rights management, you will occasionally receive requests to remove content. How you handle these requests matters for both legal compliance and customer relationships.

Respond Promptly

Acknowledge takedown requests within 24-48 hours. Even if the actual removal takes a few days to propagate across your website and marketing channels, a fast acknowledgment shows respect and good faith.

Remove First, Discuss Later

If a customer asks you to remove their content, remove it. Do not argue that your terms of service grant you perpetual rights, even if they technically do. The legal cost of a dispute far exceeds the value of any single piece of content, and the reputational cost of publicly fighting a customer over their own content is enormous.

Document the Removal

Record what was removed, when, and why. This documentation protects you if questions arise later and helps you identify patterns (for example, if many customers are requesting removal after seeing their content in ads, that might indicate your advertising terms are not clear enough).

Update Your Processes

If takedown requests reveal gaps in your rights management — customers who did not realize their content would be used in ads, or who did not understand the scope of your terms — update your terms and communication to be clearer. Each takedown request is feedback on your process.

Ethical Best Practices Beyond Legal Requirements

Legal compliance is the floor, not the ceiling. Ethical UGC practices build trust and encourage more customers to share content.

Always Attribute

Even when your terms do not require it, credit the original creator. Use their name or social handle alongside their content. Attribution costs nothing and communicates respect. It also encourages other customers to contribute content because they see that contributors get recognized.

Maintain Context

Use customer content in a context that matches the creator's intent. A review submitted for a specific product should appear on that product's page, not repurposed for an unrelated product. A glowing review for your moisturizer should not appear next to your new serum that the customer has never tried.

Represent Diversity Honestly

If your customer base is diverse, your UGC display should reflect that diversity. If it is not, do not selectively feature content to create a misleading impression. Authenticity is the entire value proposition of UGC — undermining it with selective curation defeats the purpose.

Communicate Changes

If you change how you use customer content — for example, starting to use review photos in paid advertising when previously you only displayed them on your website — consider notifying existing reviewers and giving them the option to opt out. This is not legally required in most cases (if your original terms covered advertising), but it demonstrates respect.

Make Opt-Out Easy

Include a clear, easy process for customers to remove their content. Do not bury the removal request behind five support tickets and a two-week waiting period. A simple email or form submission should be sufficient, and processing should happen within a few business days.

Respect the Spirit of Consent

A customer who submits a review photo for your website is not necessarily consenting to every possible commercial use of their image. Even if your terms are broad enough to cover any use, consider whether the specific use aligns with what the customer reasonably expected when they submitted their content.

Building a Rights Management System

For stores with significant UGC volume, manual rights tracking becomes unmanageable. Here is a practical system:

Content Database

Maintain a database or spreadsheet that tracks every piece of UGC with:

Content ID and file location
Original creator name and contact
Source (review form, social media, direct submission)
Date permissions were obtained
Scope of permissions (display, modification, advertising, etc.)
Version of terms in effect at time of consent
Current usage locations (product page, ads, emails, etc.)
Any removal requests and their status

Terms Versioning

Keep archived copies of every version of your content usage terms, with effective dates. When terms change, note which customers consented under which version. This is critical for GDPR compliance and for resolving disputes.

Audit Schedule

Quarterly, audit your UGC usage to ensure:

All displayed content has proper permissions on file
Removed content has actually been removed from all locations
New marketing uses (like a new ad campaign) are covered by existing permissions
Terms of service are still current and comprehensive

How This Fits Into Your Review and UGC Strategy

Rights management is not a separate initiative — it is a layer built into your review collection and UGC video strategy. When you collect content through proper channels with clear terms, and display it using tools that respect your rights framework, the legal and ethical considerations largely take care of themselves.

Eevy AI displays customer review content — text, photos, and video — that was submitted through your store's review collection flow, where terms of service govern the submission. This means the content displayed through Eevy's review widgets, photo galleries, and video sections is content your customers explicitly submitted for the purpose of sharing their experience. The rights management foundation is built into the collection process itself.

Conclusion

UGC rights management sounds complicated, but the core principles are straightforward: get clear permission, document it, use content respectfully, and honor removal requests promptly. Most of the legal protection you need comes from having clear terms on your review submission form and maintaining basic records of permissions.

The ethical layer is equally simple: treat customer content the way you would want your own content treated. Attribute it. Use it in context. Do not stretch permissions beyond what the customer reasonably expected. Make it easy to opt out.

Stores that handle UGC rights well create a virtuous cycle. Customers see their content displayed respectfully with proper attribution, which encourages more customers to contribute content, which gives you a larger library of social proof, which drives more conversions. The stores that cut corners on rights management eventually face a takedown request, a negative social media post, or — in the worst case — a legal demand that costs far more than doing it right from the beginning.

Invest the time to set up your rights management correctly now. It is one of those foundational decisions that pays off quietly every day your store is open.