Usage rights
What you can do with the content
The licence you bought, when it starts, and what to do when it runs out.
Read it before you fund, not after
The licence is visible on the offer and on the contract, and it is the creator's to set. Before you pay is the moment to ask for longer or wider if the campaign needs it. Afterwards it is fixed.
Paying for content is not the same as owning it outright. What you bought is a licence: permission to use the work, for a period, on the terms printed on the contract.
The two shapes
Perpetual. No end date. You may keep using the work indefinitely. This is what a contract carries when nothing else is set.
A fixed period. A number of months, usually three, six or twelve. When it ends you should stop using the work commercially.
A longer licence costs more, and reasonably so: a creator granting unlimited use is giving up every future conversation about the same asset.
When the period starts
At completion, meaning the day the collaboration is finished and approved. Not at signature, and not at the date you first ran the campaign.
That works in your favour more often than not. Files sitting unused for a month while a campaign is scheduled do not eat into the licence.
Before it expires
You are emailed roughly a month out. Nothing stops working: no file is withdrawn and no post is taken down. It is a reminder that the permission is about to end.
The creator is prompted separately, closer to the date, to offer you more months. So a renewal often arrives without you having to ask.
Put the expiry in your own calendar as well. The notification helps, and the obligation is yours.
Carrying on after it ends
Ask the creator for an extension, or wait for the one they offer.
It arrives as an ordinary offer: a line saying what is being extended, the number of months, and their price. You accept and pay it exactly as you would any other offer, and it becomes its own contract linked to the original. The original is left alone.
The extra months run from the current expiry, not from the day you pay. Renewing a week early does not cost you that week. It is the same licence, continued.
That keeps one record of what was agreed and when, and makes a renewal a short transaction rather than a negotiation about what the last one covered.
If you use it after expiry
That is a breach of the terms you agreed to. CollabNordic records the licence and reminds both sides, and does not police what happens to files afterwards. The creator's first step is to contact you, and most of these turn out to be an ad set nobody remembered to switch off.
What you cannot change
The licence. It is set by the creator and cannot be edited by a brand, before or after funding. What you can do is ask, and creators say yes to a priced request far more often than to an assumption.