Licence
What is free, what needs a licence, and what is never allowed, on one page.
This is a summary. The full rules are in our Terms of Use, which bind and prevail.
BackgroundMax Licence · Version 2.0 · Effective 12 November 2026
We make every Background with our own software. Free for your personal use as an individual; anything commercial needs our written licence first. This page is a summary; the Terms of Use (Terms §1 to §12) bind and prevail.
1. Free or licence
| Use | Free? |
|---|---|
| Wallpaper on your screens, work or school devices included | Yes |
| Video-call background on Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Google Meet, privately or as a student or employee, without company branding | Yes |
| Your personal profile picture or banner on LinkedIn, X, Instagram or Discord, on an account that earns and advertises nothing | Yes |
| Channel art, thumbnails or video backgrounds on your own YouTube, Twitch or TikTok channel that earns nothing and promotes no business | Yes |
| Any channel, account or site that earns money in any way or promotes a business | Licence |
| Your channel or site starts earning: within 30 days, get a licence for or replace channel art, banners and site backgrounds; old posts stay only without ads, sponsors or paid access | Licence |
| Slides you present yourself: as a student, in your own lessons, at a private talk, in an internal meeting as an employee | Yes |
| Marketing or sales slides, paid courses, webinars, slide templates | Licence |
| Page background on your personal site or blog that earns nothing and promotes no business, never as a download | Yes |
| Personal projects in Adobe Photoshop, Canva or similar | Yes |
| Home prints, private invitations, unsold gifts | Yes |
| Sending one privately to people you know, for their personal use | Yes |
| Freelance or client work; any company's website, accounts, adverts or documents | Licence |
| Products, merchandise, apps or designs for others, with your own substantial design | Licence |
| A logo, brand identity, app icon or trade mark | Never |
| Posting files publicly, wallpaper sites, apps or packs, selling the Background itself, NFTs | Never |
| AI training or datasets | Written dataset licence only; we may refuse |
2. Always
- Share links, not files, except privately with people you know.
- Never download with bots, scripts or download managers.
- Do not load our full-size files into other sites from our servers.
- Posting on a platform that trains AI on uploads is no breach; remove it there if we ask.
3. When you need a licence
A commercial licence exists only in writing, from an @backgroundmax.com address, with a licence number. Ask at [email protected] with the image IDs, the user, purpose, place, audience, period and any client. Unsure? Ask first.
Commercial use without a licence: we may ask you to stop and claim compensation, normally at least the licence fee. Tell us first and we offer a licence for past use at our standard price, nothing added. Serious or repeated breaches end your free licence; you must then delete the Backgrounds concerned.
4. Search and AI
Our robots.txt file is a technical request: it lets crawlers fetch pages only for search results or AI answers, never to copy Backgrounds. Results and answers may show one small thumbnail linking to us. AI training on our Backgrounds or descriptions is not allowed.
Full rules: Terms of Use v2.0. Commercial licences come with our Commercial Licence Terms, which we send with each licence.