Usage Rights and Licensing Schedule
This page explains who owns the work we produce for you, when that ownership passes, what sits inside a deliverable under someone else's licence, and the permission we ask for to show completed work in our portfolio. It applies to every project and every retainer we run.
Table of Content
1. What this schedule covers
Sphin Media is the studio brand operated by Assur Media, a UAE Free Zone Company registered under the Sharjah Research Technology and Innovation Park Free Zone Authority, Registration No. 9978. Assur Media is the contracting party, and all commercial and legal correspondence is issued under Assur Media.
This schedule sets out four things: what you come to own, what passes to you under someone else's licence, where and for how long you may use the work, and the permission we ask for to show completed work in our portfolio.
It applies alongside your Master Services Agreement and each Statement of Work. Where a specific engagement agrees something different in writing, that written arrangement applies for that engagement.
2. Ownership of your final deliverables
Ownership of your final deliverables passes to you by a written assignment of our economic rights, in the form the United Arab Emirates copyright law requires, once you have approved and accepted the work and the full price has been received in cleared funds. Until then, no ownership of, and no licence in, any draft, deliverable, source file, or working file passes to you.
The assignment states the rights assigned, their purpose, and the duration and place of use, as United Arab Emirates copyright law requires for an effective transfer of economic rights. Its scope is worldwide, across all platforms, with no time limit. You own all the economic rights expressly assigned, and any right not expressly assigned remains with Assur Media.
Some elements within a deliverable are licensed from third parties and cannot be transferred. These include stock music, stock footage, stock visuals, fonts, and AI-generated voice. You receive the benefit of those licences as the assets are used within your deliverable, subject to the terms of the provider that supplied them. Section 6 sets out how this works, and section 7 sets out the same position for AI-generated and AI-assisted elements.
Moral rights cannot be assigned or waived under United Arab Emirates copyright law and remain with the individual people who created the work. That does not affect your ownership of the economic rights in your deliverables, or your use of them under this schedule.
3. Payment in full: the condition on every transfer
No ownership of, and no licence in, any draft, deliverable, source file, or working file passes to you until the full price of your engagement has been received in cleared funds. This applies to everything we produce for you, at every stage, whether or not you have approved it.
A discount applied at checkout, for example a website discount or the portfolio discount in section 12, counts towards the full price. The full price is the price after any discount you have been given, and the condition is met when that amount has been received in cleared funds.
A Standalone Project is any purchase that is not a retainer. This includes Launch packages and individual projects such as a Brand Build, a Website Build, or a Short-Form Video Pack.
If you are paying for a Standalone Project by instalments under a payment plan, the condition is met when the final instalment has cleared, and not when the deposit or an intermediate instalment has cleared. Until then we retain ownership of the work in progress, including any approved drafts and the source and working files behind them. If a scheduled payment is not received, work pauses and the order may be cancelled, as set out in the Order and Checkout Terms and the Refund and Cancellation Policy.
On a retainer, the deliverables produced in a given month pass to you once the fee for that month has been received in cleared funds.
4. Drafts, interim deliverables, and refunds
A draft you approve along the way, such as an approved Milestone 1 deliverable, does not become yours on approval. Approval records the stage we have reached. Payment in full is what transfers rights. Until the full price has been received in cleared funds, an approved draft remains ours, and you may not use it, publish it, or have it developed further by anyone else.
Where your engagement was paid in full at the point you take a stage refund, you may keep and use the drafts you had already approved at that point. That concession applies in that case only. If any part of the price was outstanding at the point of the refund, no rights in any draft pass to you, and the drafts, source files and working files remain ours.
We keep the right to decline a refund where there is an objective, stated basis to conclude the refund right is being misused, or where there is substantiated evidence of fraud or unlawful activity connected to the engagement. The refund stages, the misuse safeguard, and the approved-drafts provision are set out in the Refund and Cancellation Policy.
5. Source and working files
Source and working files are included as standard, at no additional charge. These are the editable working files behind your deliverables, for example layered design files, Blender project files, raw footage, and audio project files.
Source and working files pass to you on the same basis as the deliverables they belong to, and on the same condition set out in section 3. They are not released early, and they are not released against a part-paid engagement.
Any third-party or AI-assisted material inside those files remains subject to its own position, as set out in sections 6 and 7.
6. Third-party assets and their licences
Some deliverables include assets we do not own and cannot transfer. These pass through under their own licences. You receive the benefit of the licence as the asset is used in your deliverable, subject to the terms of the provider that supplied it. You do not own these assets, and any right to reuse them outside the delivered work depends on the provider's terms.
The providers we use in production are:
| Provider | What we use it for |
|---|---|
| Epidemic Sound | Music and audio |
| Envato | Stock visuals and footage |
| ElevenLabs | AI voice, AI video, and AI music |
| Coolors | Colour tools |
| Adobe Creative Cloud | Fonts and production software |
Typefaces. Our brand typeface is Readex Pro, which is published under the Open Font Licence. Where a specific deliverable uses a font supplied under an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, that font is licensed to us under Adobe's terms and is not transferred with the deliverable. If you want to use that font yourself, you will need your own licence for it.
For third-party assets inside a deliverable, the scope of use is whatever the relevant provider's licence allows. That scope may be narrower than the worldwide, all-platforms, no-time-limit scope of the assignment in section 2.
The specific terms of each provider's licence are set by that provider and can change, so we do not restate them here. Where a deliverable depends on a third-party asset, we will identify the asset and its licence basis on request.
7. AI-generated and AI-assisted content
We use AI tools in production. The tools in our stack are:
| Tool | What we use it for |
|---|---|
| ElevenLabs | Voice, video, and music |
| ChatGPT | Image generation, and ideation and analysis |
| Claude | Ideation and analysis |
AI-generated and AI-assisted elements are carved out of the assignment in section 2, on the same basis as third-party assets. The reason is straightforward: AI-generated output may not attract copyright protection in every jurisdiction, and we cannot assign rights we do not hold.
Where an element of your deliverable was generated or assisted by an AI tool, we assign whatever rights we hold in it and pass through the benefit of the relevant tool provider's terms. We do not state that such an element is protected by copyright, and we do not state that another party is prevented from producing something similar.
We do not enter your personal data into these tools.
We disclose our use of AI on request. If you want to know which elements of a deliverable were AI-generated or AI-assisted, ask us and we will tell you.
8. Model, talent and location releases
No recognisable person appears in a deliverable without a signed release covering that use. The same applies to identifiable premises where the owner or the occupier requires it.
| Who or what appears | Who obtains and holds the release |
|---|---|
| Your staff, including clinical and reception staff | You |
| Your patients or your customers | You |
| Your premises, for example a clinic, a treatment room, or a shopfront | You |
| Talent we engage, for example a presenter, a model, or a voice artist | Us |
| A location we source | Us |
You obtain and hold the releases in your column before the shoot, and you confirm to us that you hold them. We obtain and hold the releases in ours.
If a release is missing on the day, we may decline to film that person, that room, or that location. We will reschedule or work around it. This is not a comment on your arrangements. It is the only responsible position where a person is identifiable in published material.
Where you are a healthcare provider, responsibility for patient consent sits with you as the licence-holder. We do not collect, receive, store, or process patient or health data. Patient releases are yours to obtain, yours to hold, and yours to produce if they are ever questioned.
9. Credit and attribution
We do not require a credit on your work. There is no obligation on you to name Sphin Media, to tag us, or to carry a credit line on anything we produce for you.
Moral rights are a separate matter and are unaffected by this. As set out in section 2, moral rights cannot be assigned or waived under United Arab Emirates copyright law and remain with the individual people who created the work.
If you would like to credit us, you are welcome to, and we appreciate it. It is entirely voluntary, and nothing on this page creates an obligation to do it.
10. Concepts we present that you do not select
During a project we may present more than one concept, route, or direction. Rights in any concept you do not select remain with Assur Media and are not assigned to you.
We will not reuse an unselected concept in another client's work in any form that is recognisably derived from your brief. Where a concept was developed for you, against your brief, it stays with your brief.
11. Our reusable studio components
We keep and reuse our own studio components. These include templates, rigs, presets, base assets, and code that we developed before or during your project and that are not specific to you. They remain ours, they are not exclusive to you or to any other client, and we may use them again on other work.
This does not affect your ownership of your deliverables. What you own is the finished work we produce for you, including anything created specifically for you, under section 2. Nothing in this section allows us to reuse your brand assets, your content, or any element created specifically for you.
12. Our portfolio and promotional use
Showing your completed work in our portfolio and promotional material is opt-in, not automatic. We do not publish your work unless you have chosen to let us.
If you opt in. You receive a 10 per cent discount, applied to the order total before any applicable tax, and you grant us a licence to display and reference the completed work in our portfolio and promotional material. This is a licence to display. It does not change who owns the work. You keep ownership under section 2.
The terms of that licence are:
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Territory | Worldwide |
| Duration | For as long as we maintain the portfolio or promotional material in which the work appears |
| Revocation | You may withdraw the permission at any time by writing to legal@assurmedia.com. Withdrawal applies to future use |
| Effect of withdrawal | We stop using the work in new portfolio and promotional material, and remove it from the channels we control, within a reasonable period. Material already printed, distributed, or published by someone else cannot be recalled |
| Discount | The 10 per cent discount already given is not clawed back if you later withdraw the permission |
A separate opt-out. You may additionally choose to withhold even the fact that we worked with you, so that the working relationship itself is not disclosed.
Your opt-in choice and the discount are recorded at the point of order. The mechanics also appear in the Order and Checkout Terms.
Third parties may not use portfolio work. Where your work appears in our portfolio, that display does not put it into the public domain and does not licence anyone else to use it. The work shown in our portfolio is protected by copyright, and rights in your work remain yours under section 2. Nothing on our website gives any visitor a licence or right to copy, download, reproduce, adapt, republish, redistribute, or use any of it, in whole or in part, for any purpose. Anyone who wants to use work shown in our portfolio must ask us first at contact@sphinmedia.com, and where the work is yours we will refer them to you. This does not affect any use that the law expressly permits without permission.
13. Arabic and bilingual versions
Arabic-language and bilingual deliverables are quoted separately. Ask us and we will price them alongside your project.
16. Governing law and how to contact us
This schedule is governed by the law of the United Arab Emirates. If something goes wrong, please contact us first at legal@assurmedia.com and we will try to resolve it with you directly. If we cannot, the courts of the United Arab Emirates have jurisdiction. Nothing here removes a right you have to bring a claim in your own country where the law of that country gives you that right and it cannot be waived.
| Contact | Details |
|---|---|
| Legal, privacy and data protection | legal@assurmedia.com |
| General enquiries | contact@sphinmedia.com |
| Pricing, packages, and new projects | sales@sphinmedia.com |
| Something is not working: payments, files, or access | support@sphinmedia.com |
| Cancelling an order, or requesting a refund | support@sphinmedia.com |
| Invoices, receipts, and billing details | admin@sphinmedia.com |
| Progress on work in hand | designers@assurmedia.com |
| Registered address | Assur Media, Block B-B50-065, SRTIP, University City, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, P.O. Box 66636 |
| Website | sphinmedia.com |
Sphin Media is the studio brand operated by Assur Media, a UAE Free Zone Company (Registration No. 9978). All commercial and legal correspondence is issued under Assur Media.