We don’t own your content. If you are the owner of the intellectual property rights in the content that you make available on the Platform, then nothing in these Terms changes that.
To provide the Platform, we need certain rights from you (called a licence). The details of these licences are set out below.
By creating, posting or otherwise making content available on the Platform, you grant to TikTok a:
non-exclusive (which means that you can licence your content to others),
royalty-free (which means that we don’t pay you for this licence),
transferable (which means that we can give the rights you give us to someone else),
sub-licensable (which means that we can licence your content to others, e.g. to service providers that help us to provide the Platform or to trusted third parties that have entered into agreements with us to operate, develop and provide the Platform) and
worldwide (which means that the licence applies anywhere in the world)
licence to use your content, including to reproduce (e.g. to copy), adapt or make derivative works (e.g. to translate and/or create captions), perform and communicate your content to the public (e.g. to display it), for the purposes of operating, developing and providing the Platform, subject to your Platform settings.
The licence to your content that you grant to us extends to Affiliates as part of making the Platform available.
You also grant to each user of the Platform a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide licence to access and use your content, including to reproduce (e.g. to copy, share or download), adapt or make derivative works (e.g. to include your content in their content) perform and communicate that content to the public (e.g. to display it) using the features and functions of the Platform for entertainment purposes, subject to your Platform settings.
Your licences to TikTok and to users end when you close your account or when you or we remove your content from the Platform in accordance with these Terms. However, due to the nature of the Platform and our legal obligations, the licence granted will continue after you have removed your content to the extent that:
you have allowed, via your Platform settings, other users of the Platform to use or reuse your content (e.g. by using Duet, Stitch, download or share functionalities); or
we are obliged to store or process your content for legal reasons.
If you choose to submit comments, ideas or feedback to us, you agree that we are free to use them for the purposes of operating, developing, improving and providing the Platform without compensation to you.
In short: When you post content to the Platform, it remains yours, but we can use it to provide the Platform, and if you choose to make your content available to others, we can show it to other users and those other users may be able to use it too. That is what our Platform is all about. If you later take it down, copies of it made by other users may remain on the Platform.