Copyright, music and image rights for practices

Each post, video, handout and ad a practice publishes is built from parts: a song under a reel, a photo of a smiling patient, a chart from a journal article, a paragraph adapted from a society’s patient leaflet. Each of those parts belongs to someone. If that someone is not you, and you do not have permission or a clear legal basis, the post that took ten minutes to make can turn into a takedown, a demand letter or a lawsuit.

This guide covers copyright, fair use, music, images, journal material, who owns what your vendors create, takedown notices, and the use of other practices’ names in ads. It does not cover patient consent for photos and stories, which is its own topic in our patient photo consent guide. For the content side of video, staff accounts and creator partnerships, see our healthcare video marketing guide, our social media policy guide and our healthcare influencer guide. Choosing and protecting your own practice name is in our medical practice branding guide. Reusing CDC, NIH and MedlinePlus patient education, including logo limits and attribution wording, is covered in our guide to using CDC and other government health materials. Keyword bidding on another practice’s name, with the Lanham Act and a keyword ruling, is covered in our guide to bidding on competitor names in search ads.

This is general information, not legal advice. Sources cited were checked on October 30, 2026: 17 U.S.C. 101, 102, 105, 106, 107, 201, 204, 504 and 512 (United States Code, 2023 edition), the U.S. Copyright Office’s fair use pages and its January 29, 2025 release on Part 2 of its artificial intelligence report, the Copyright Office DMCA designated agent directory, and Google’s Ads trademark policy. Copyright outcomes turn on facts, and courts decide fair use case by case. Trademark and advertising rules also differ by state. Ask an intellectual property attorney before you rely on fair use or use another business’s name.

What copyright gives the owner

Under 17 U.S.C. 106, the owner of a copyright has the exclusive right to reproduce the work, to prepare derivative works based on it, to distribute copies, to perform it publicly and to display it publicly. For sound recordings, the owner also has the exclusive right to perform the work publicly by digital audio transmission. Copying a photo onto your site, cutting a song into a reel, redrawing a chart, or posting a scanned handout each touch one or more of those rights.

Copyright has limits. Section 102(b) says copyright protection never extends to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle or discovery, however it is described or illustrated. In practice terms: the findings of a study are not owned by the journal, but the article’s wording, its figures and its tables are expression that can be.

The stakes are set out in 17 U.S.C. 504(c). A copyright owner can choose statutory damages instead of proving actual losses. The court sets these at not less than 750 dollars and not more than 30,000 dollars per work infringed, and can raise them to as much as 150,000 dollars per work when the infringement was willful.

Fair use is a defense, not a permission slip

Section 107 says the fair use of a copyrighted work for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research is not an infringement. Courts weigh four factors: the purpose and character of the use, including whether it is commercial; the nature of the copyrighted work; the amount used in relation to the whole; and the effect of the use on the market for the work.

The Copyright Office’s fair use page adds three points that matter for a practice:

Courts evaluate fair use claims case by case, and there is no formula that makes a set percentage, number of words, lines or pages safe to use without permission.
Courts are more likely to find nonprofit educational and noncommercial uses fair, and “transformative” uses are more likely to be considered fair. Practice marketing is commercial.
Using a creative work, such as a song or a movie, is less likely to support fair use than using a factual work, such as a technical article.

Use: fair use as a question for your attorney about a specific post, before you publish it. Avoid: treating a credit line, a short clip length or “no copyright intended” as a substitute for permission. None of those appear among the four factors in the statute.

Music in social video and ads

A recorded song carries two layers of rights: the musical work (the composition and lyrics) and the sound recording (that specific recording). Section 106 lists separate rights for each. A practice video with a song under it reproduces and performs both.

Use: music you have a written license for, covering the exact use: organic posts, paid ads, your website, or all three.
Use: a social platform’s built-in music library only within that platform’s terms. Read the terms that apply to business accounts and to paid promotion, and save a dated copy of them with the post.
Use: music your team wrote and recorded, or no music, with captions doing the work.
Avoid: downloading a track and adding it in an editing app, then posting it as an ad or on your site.
Avoid: assuming that a song available inside an app for personal posts is licensed for an ad, a boosted post or your website.
Avoid: chart hits for any paid ad unless you hold a license for that exact ad use.

Photos and images

A photo you found in a search result, on another practice’s site or in a news article belongs to whoever took it, or to whoever they transferred the rights to. A stock license is a contract, and its terms set where and how the image may be used. Before you place a stock image next to a condition or treatment, check whether the license allows that kind of use. Read the license, keep a copy, and match the use to it.

Works of the U.S. government are a separate case. Section 105 says copyright protection is not available for any work of the United States Government. That covers text and images federal employees create as part of their jobs. Federal health sites can also carry images or material from outside contributors that remain under copyright, so check the credit line or the site’s reuse notes before you copy an image.

Our own rule, which we suggest to practices too: use photos of your own team, space and equipment, taken with written consent from each person shown, and no stock models posing as your patients or clinicians. A real photo of your front desk does more for a patient deciding where to book than a polished image of a stranger. The consent side is in our patient photo consent guide, and before and after images have their own rules in our testimonials and before and after photos guide.

Images made with generative AI raise two separate questions. On ownership, the Copyright Office’s January 29, 2025 release on Part 2 of its AI report concluded that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. On honesty, an image that looks like your office, your clinicians or your patients but is not can mislead the person deciding whether to book. We do not use AI images to stand in for real people or places in practice marketing.

Journal figures, guidelines and patient handouts

Clinicians like to share evidence, and that is good content. The rights question is about form, not facts.

Use: the findings, in your own words, with a citation and a link to the source.
Use: a figure, table or long quotation only with written permission from the rights holder, which for a journal article is the publisher or the author, depending on the publication agreement.
Use: open access material only within the license printed on the article, including any attribution and noncommercial terms. A noncommercial license may not cover practice marketing.
Use: patient handouts from professional societies, device makers or other organizations only within their stated reuse terms. Link to the original where the terms do not allow copying.
Avoid: screenshots of a figure or a guideline page posted to social media.
Avoid: retyping another organization’s handout with your logo on it. That is reproduction and a derivative work under section 106, even when the content is accurate.

For how to write and review health content in your own words, see our medically reviewed health content guide.

Who owns what your vendors make

A website, logo, photo shoot or video made for your practice is not automatically yours. Section 201 says copyright vests initially in the author. The exception is a work made for hire, where the employer or the person who commissioned it is considered the author.

Section 101 defines a work made for hire in two ways: a work prepared by an employee within the scope of their employment, or a work specially ordered or commissioned in one of a listed set of categories, if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by both that it is a work made for hire. The listed categories include a contribution to a collective work, part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, a compilation and an instructional text, among others. Not each piece of marketing fits one of them.

Where work for hire does not apply, ownership moves only by a transfer. Section 204(a) says a transfer of copyright ownership is not valid unless it is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or their authorized agent.

Use: a written agreement with each photographer, videographer, designer, writer and agency that says who owns the finished work and the raw files, or what license you receive and for how long.
Use: a list of third-party parts inside the work (fonts, stock images, music, code) and the license each one carries, so you know what you can keep using if the vendor relationship ends.
Avoid: paying for a site or a logo on an invoice that says nothing about rights.
Avoid: assuming that a staff member’s personal photos or videos, made off the clock, belong to the practice.

Takedown notices: when someone copies you, or claims you copied them

Section 512 of the Copyright Act, added by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, sets up a notice and takedown process for online service providers. A host that stores material at a user’s direction keeps a limit on its liability if it meets conditions that include acting expeditiously to remove or disable access to material after a proper notice, and designating an agent to receive notices with the Copyright Office.

Under 512(c)(3)(A), a notice must include, in substance:

A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act for the copyright owner.
Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to be infringed.
Identification of the infringing material and information reasonably sufficient for the host to locate it.
Contact information for the complaining party.
A statement of good faith belief that the use is not authorized by the owner, its agent or the law.
A statement that the information is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act for the owner.

If a competitor copies your blog posts or photos, this is the route to ask their host or the platform to remove them. Be careful with it: section 512(f) makes a person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material is infringing liable for damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees. Send a notice only for work you own or have authority over, and only when you are confident the use is not authorized.

If your own site lets visitors post content, such as comments or a forum, ask counsel whether to register a designated agent in the Copyright Office’s DMCA designated agent directory. The 512(c) limit on liability applies only if the service provider has designated an agent.

Other practices’ names in your ads

A competing practice’s name may be a trademark, registered or not. Google’s Ads trademark policy, checked October 30, 2026, says that when a trademark owner submits a complaint, Google reviews it and may restrict use of the trademark. The policy lists what it will and will not restrict:

Google will not restrict using trademarks as keywords.
Google will restrict using trademarks in an ad from a direct competitor, and ads that use the trademark in a confusing, deceptive or misleading way.
Google will not restrict ads that use the trademark descriptively in its ordinary meaning.

Google’s policy is not the same as trademark law. A keyword the platform allows can still lead to a dispute, and a name in ad text that confuses a patient about who they are booking with is a problem for the patient first. For ads that name or compare against another practice, see our guide to naming competitor practices in ads.

Use: your own practice name, your clinicians’ names and your services in ad text.
Use: a written decision, with counsel’s input, before bidding on another practice’s name as a keyword.
Avoid: another practice’s name in your headline or description.
Avoid: copy that implies a referral, merger or connection with another practice that does not exist.

Where things go wrong

A staff member adds a trending song to a reel on a personal phone, then the clip is reused in a paid ad.
A blog post lifts a chart from a journal article with a credit line and no permission.
A web designer uses images from a search result as placeholders, and they go live.
A practice changes agencies and finds the old agency owns the site design, the photos and the logo files.
A society’s patient leaflet is retyped onto practice letterhead.
An ad group bids on a neighboring practice’s name and repeats the name in the ad headline.
A takedown notice is sent against a former employee’s personal content the practice does not own.

An illustration

The following is an invented illustration, not a real practice or event.

[Practice name], a two-location physical therapy clinic, wants a series of short exercise videos. The plan before review: a song from a streaming service under each video, a figure from a published trial on the first one, stock photos of athletes on the thumbnails, and an ad campaign that bids on two nearby clinics’ names.

After review: the videos use music licensed in writing for organic posts and ads, with a dated copy of the license on file. The trial is summarized in the therapist’s own words with a link to the abstract, and no figure. Thumbnails use stills of the clinic’s own therapists, who signed written consent. The videographer’s contract assigns copyright in the finished videos and raw footage to the clinic in a signed writing. The ad campaign bids on the clinic’s own name and its services, and the decision on competitor keywords goes to counsel.

Checklist: a rights log for each piece of marketing

Who made each part: staff, vendor, platform library, stock site, government source or another organization.
What gives you the right to use it: you own it, a signed assignment, a written license (with its terms and dates), or a written opinion from counsel on fair use.
Where it will run: organic social, paid ads, website, print, email. Check that the license covers each.
Consent on file for each identifiable person shown.
No other practice’s name in ad text, and a counsel decision on file for any competitor keywords.
A contact and a process for receiving and sending takedown notices.
A date to recheck licenses that expire.

How we help

We build websites, local search, Google Ads and lead generation and AI front desk tools for independent practices and health businesses. On rights, that means sites built with your own photos or properly licensed assets, a list of what each third-party part is licensed for, written terms on who owns the work we deliver, and ad campaigns that keep other practices’ names out of ad text. Our tools are built with HIPAA in mind. We confirm in writing what a BAA covers before any patient information flows through a tool, and if it is not covered, we do not route patient information through it. We are not a healthcare provider and we do not give legal or intellectual property advice. For the wider rules, see our healthcare marketing rules hub.

Can we use a song in our practice video if we only use a few seconds?

There is no safe number of seconds. The Copyright Office says there is no formula that makes a set amount of a work safe to use without permission, and courts weigh the amount used as one of four factors. Use music licensed in writing for that exact use, or none.

Is crediting the photographer or journal enough?

No. A credit line is not a license. Section 106 gives the owner the right to reproduce and display the work, and a credit does not appear among the four fair use factors in section 107. Get written permission or describe the content in your own words.

Can we use images and text from federal health websites?

Section 105 says copyright protection is not available for works of the United States Government. Federal sites can still contain material from outside contributors that stays under copyright, so check credit lines and the site’s reuse notes first.

Do we own the website and photos our agency made for us?

Only if a written agreement says so. Copyright starts with the author under section 201. Commissioned work is a work made for hire only in listed categories and with a signed written agreement, and any other transfer must be in writing and signed under section 204(a).

Can we bid on a competing practice’s name in Google Ads?

Google’s trademark policy says it will not restrict trademarks used as keywords, but it will restrict a direct competitor’s use of a trademark in ad text after a complaint. Platform policy is not trademark law, so ask counsel before you bid on another practice’s name.

Someone copied our blog posts. What can we do?

Under 17 U.S.C. 512, you can send a takedown notice to the host’s designated agent with the elements listed in 512(c)(3)(A), including a statement under penalty of perjury. Send it only for content you own, since knowingly false notices carry liability under 512(f).

Copyright, music and image rights in practice marketing