Can You Sell It? Licensing in Practice
Copyright is about whether anyone else can copy your work. Licensing is about whether the platform permits you to sell it at all. These are separate questions and people conflate them constantly.
Read your tool's terms for these four things specifically:
- Are commercial rights included on your plan? Several platforms grant them only on paid tiers — free-tier output can be personal use only.
- What happens if you stop paying? Some terms retroactively restrict use of work made during a subscription once it lapses.
- Are your generations public? Several platforms make everything visible to other users by default, including on paid plans. This matters enormously for client work under NDA — check before you generate anything confidential.
- Is there indemnification? Some enterprise offerings (Adobe, Google, OpenAI, Microsoft) will defend you if a third party claims your generated output infringes. For meaningful commercial exposure, this is worth real money.
Client contracts. Increasingly, agency and publisher contracts contain explicit AI clauses — sometimes disclosure requirements, sometimes outright prohibition, sometimes a warranty that you own everything you deliver, which you may not be able to give truthfully for purely generated work. Read them, and raise it early rather than at delivery.
Stock and platform rules differ too. Some stock libraries accept AI work with disclosure, some ban it, some require model releases you cannot obtain for a generated face. Print-on-demand services, app stores, game marketplaces and competitions all have their own policies. Check the destination before you make the work.