Permission with a shape and an end date
Nothing about a download moves ownership. The maker keeps copyright and hands over a described permission, which is why these documents are built the way they are: a short grant clause saying what you may do, then a long restrictions clause where all the money is. Read the second one first. Four properties describe almost any grant. Breadth: does the permission attach to one end product, or to everything your company ships? Ceiling: are copies, impressions or seats being counted? Term: does the permission end, and does it end because a payment ended? Assignability: may the permission move to the client who takes over the site? Two assets sitting in the same project folder can differ on all four, so a written record per project is safer than a memory of what a marketplace usually does. This is vocabulary rather than legal advice, and the distinction starts to matter the moment a real dispute does.
The terms move; your copy should not
Marketplaces revise their terms, and the version governing your use is the one in force when you downloaded. Save that page alongside the asset identifier, the date and the project it went into. That folder is the only thing that answers a due-diligence question in minutes, and building it costs seconds per asset against days of reconstruction when a buyer's counsel asks where a hero image came from.
Two properties do most of the harm. The first is the editorial restriction, which is not advice about tone. An editorial asset arrives without releases, meaning the people, marks and buildings inside it have agreed to nothing, and as soon as the image promotes, packages or implies endorsement the clearance the seller relied on stops covering you. A news item on a company blog can sit inside the restriction. The identical picture on a pricing page does not. The second is duration tied to payment. Subscription libraries grant use while the account is funded and expect every use registered against a named project, so when payment stops the downloads on your drive are files with no grant behind them. Neither trap needs a lawyer to avoid. Log each use as it happens, buy perpetual per-item licences for whatever must survive a cancellation, and settle who owns each grant before handover, ideally by buying under the client's own account and rebilling. Which supplier suits which buying pattern is a separate question, handled in the guide to which marketplace to buy from.