{"course":{"slug":"ai-images","title":"Image Generation, in Practice","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-images","level":"beginner","track":"create"},"lesson":{"slug":"rights-and-disclosure","title":"What you can sell, and what you must disclose","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-images/rights-and-disclosure","position":21,"of":69,"minutes":10,"answer":"Being licensed to use a model, owning its output, and having to disclose that output is generated are three separate questions, and only the ownership one is genuinely unsettled.","keyIdea":"Being licensed to use a model, owning its output, and having to disclose that output is generated are three separate questions, and only the ownership one is genuinely unsettled."},"body":{"format":"markdown","text":"## Four questions, routinely mashed into one\n\nPeople ask \"can I use AI images commercially\" as though it were a single question. It is four, they have different answers, and only one of them is unsettled.\n\n1. Was the model trained lawfully?\n2. Are you licensed to use this model?\n3. Do you own the output?\n4. Does the output infringe somebody else?\n\nNone of what follows is legal advice. It is the shape of the problem. A lawyer in your own country is the person who answers it for your case.\n\n> Figure: Four questions, asked in the order that saves time. Steps: 1. Licensed to use it? (A definite answer, in two minutes. Read the model card today.); 2. Does it infringe? (The risk that bites. A mark, a face, a known character.); 3. Do you own it? (Unsettled, and different by country.); 4. Trained lawfully? (Live litigation. Decide how much exposure to carry.). Only the first has an answer you can look up. People ask the last one most and the second one least, which is exactly the wrong way round.\n\n## One: was the model trained lawfully\n\nLive litigation, several countries, no settled answer. Getty sued Stability in the US and the UK. Artists have brought class actions in the US. Publishers and image libraries have brought proceedings in Europe. Some cases have narrowed, some have settled quietly, none has produced a clean rule.\n\nYou will not resolve this and you do not have to. What you can do is decide how much exposure to it you want to carry, which leads to the tools that offer indemnity, below.\n\n## Two: are you licensed to use the model\n\nThis one has a definite answer and you can look it up in two minutes. It is lesson one's licence trap.\n\n- Open weights carry a licence. Apache 2.0 releases such as FLUX.1 [schnell] and Qwen-Image permit commercial use. FLUX.1 [dev] does not. Stability's recent community licence is free below a revenue threshold and paid above it.\n- Hosted tools carry terms of service, and free tiers frequently restrict commercial use where paid tiers do not.\n\nThese positions were accurate in 2025 and they change. Read the model card or terms page on the day the job starts.\n\n## Three: do you own the output\n\nGenuinely unsettled, and different by country. The short version:\n\n- **The United States** requires human authorship. Prompts alone do not make you an author. Your own expressive contributions (a drawing you fed in, your edits, your arrangement) can be protected.\n- **The United Kingdom** and a group of jurisdictions with similar provisions, including India, deem the author of a computer-generated work to be the person who made the arrangements for its creation.\n- **China's** Beijing Internet Court reached the opposite conclusion to the US on similar facts, finding protection where the user's choices showed personal intellectual investment.\n- **The European Union** has no harmonised answer and its member states are working it through.\n\nThe same image can be unprotectable in one country and protected in another. [Making things with AI](/learn/making-things-with-ai) sets out the cases in detail.\n\nThe practical consequences: a prompt is not property, \"you own your outputs\" in a tool's terms is a promise not to claim it rather than a right the company can create, and for a logo you should route around the problem entirely: trademark protects a mark through use and registration however it was drawn.\n\n## Four: does it infringe somebody else\n\nThis is the risk that actually bites, and it is the one people ask about least. A recognisable cartoon character, a real person's face, a trade dress, a style so specific it names a living artist. That exposure exists whether a human or a model drew it.\n\n**Indemnification** is what Adobe, Getty and Shutterstock offer on business plans: if a claim arrives about the training data behind their generator, they will stand behind it. Read the exclusions. It covers what the model learned from. It does not cover you prompting a famous mouse.\n\n## Labelling: moving fast, in one direction\n\n- **China** has required both a visible label and a metadata label on synthetic content since September 2025, with a duty on platforms to check.\n- **India** amended its IT Rules for synthetically generated information and prescribed *visibility*: a label covering a defined portion of the frame and the opening portion of audio, plus a platform duty to verify user declarations.\n- **The European Union's** AI Act requires machine-readable marking of generated output and disclosure of deepfakes; the timetable has been amended more than once, so check the current position.\n- **The United States** has no general federal labelling law, a 2025 statute on non-consensual intimate imagery, and a patchwork of state election rules.\n\nThe technical layer (C2PA Content Credentials, and invisible watermarks such as Google's SynthID) is real and fragile. A screenshot destroys it. Many re-uploads strip it. It is worth attaching and it is not a substitute for a label a person can see.\n\n## The line for telling a client\n\nTell them, in writing, whenever a reasonable viewer could take the image as a record of something real: a person, a place, a product's actual appearance, a customer, an event. Tell them also when they will license the asset onward, because the ownership question becomes theirs and they need to know what they are selling.\n\nOne line in the delivery note does it:\n\n> Assets 3, 5 and 7 are AI-generated. They do not depict real people or real events. Generated with [tool] under [plan]; source files and settings supplied.\n\nThat sentence has never lost anybody a job. Discovering it later has.\n\nToday: write that line into your own delivery template, before you need it."},"check":{"question":"An agency in India delivers a generated photograph of a smiling \"customer\" for a client's testimonial page, with no label, arguing that the tool's terms grant them ownership of outputs so there is nothing to disclose. What is wrong with that reasoning?","options":[{"text":"Nothing, provided the tool's terms genuinely assign output ownership to the paying user.","correct":false,"tempting":"Treats a contract term about ownership as an answer to a duty that arises from disclosure law instead."},{"text":"The file only needs a C2PA Content Credential attached to satisfy the requirement.","correct":false,"tempting":"Relies on metadata that a screenshot or a re-upload removes, where the rule prescribes something a viewer can actually see."},{"text":"Ownership and disclosure are separate questions; a synthetic image presented as a real customer is precisely what labelling rules address, India's IT Rules prescribe a visible label, and the client should have been told in writing that the asset is generated.","correct":true},{"text":"Synthetic-media rules cover video deepfakes of identifiable individuals, so a still image of an invented person falls outside them.","correct":false,"tempting":"Assumes these rules are limited to video and to impersonation of named people, rather than to synthetic content presented as real."}]},"prev":{"slug":"writing-the-spec","title":"The one page that ends the revision argument","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-images/writing-the-spec"},"next":{"slug":"the-prompt-in-slots","title":"Build the prompt in slots, not as a sentence you keep rewriting","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-images/the-prompt-in-slots"},"authorship":"Founder and series editor: Dr Mustafa Mun. Written by AI models to a written standard. Exam keys checked blind by a second model: 3,665 of 3,666 agreed. Academic review invited.","review":{"status":"Draft, open for academic review"},"cite":"Addaly (2026) 'What you can sell, and what you must disclose', in Image Generation, in Practice. Edited by M. Mun. Addaly. Available at: https://addaly.com/learn/ai-images/rights-and-disclosure (Accessed: 31 October 2026).","licence":{"name":"CC BY-NC-SA 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"},"reader":{"schema":1,"title":"What you can sell, and what you must disclose","courseTitle":"Image Generation, in Practice","module":{"index":2,"slug":"the-brief","title":"From a request to a specification you can generate against"},"answer":null,"keyIdea":"Being licensed to use a model, owning its output, and having to disclose that output is generated are three separate questions, and only the ownership one is genuinely unsettled.","hero":{"kind":"figure","figure":{"t":"figure","label":"Figure","figure":{"type":"flow","steps":[{"label":"Licensed to use it?","detail":"A definite answer, in two minutes. Read the model card today."},{"label":"Does it infringe?","detail":"The risk that bites. A mark, a face, a known character."},{"label":"Do you own it?","detail":"Unsettled, and different by country."},{"label":"Trained lawfully?","detail":"Live litigation. Decide how much exposure to carry."}],"title":"Four questions, asked in the order that saves time","caption":"Only the first has an answer you can look up. People ask the last one most and the second one least, which is exactly the wrong way round."},"alt":"Figure: Four questions, asked in the order that saves time. Steps: 1. Licensed to use it? (A definite answer, in two minutes. Read the model card today.); 2. Does it infringe? (The risk that bites. A mark, a face, a known character.); 3. Do you own it? (Unsettled, and different by country.); 4. Trained lawfully? (Live litigation. Decide how much exposure to carry.). Only the first has an answer you can look up. People ask the last one most and the second one least, which is exactly the wrong way round."}},"blocks":[{"t":"h2","id":"four-questions-routinely-mashed-into-one","runs":[{"text":"Four questions, routinely mashed into one"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"People ask “can I use AI images commercially” as though it were a single question. It is four, they have different answers, and only one of them is unsettled."}]},{"t":"ol","start":1,"items":[[{"text":"Was the model trained lawfully?"}],[{"text":"Are you licensed to use this model?"}],[{"text":"Do you own the output?"}],[{"text":"Does the output infringe somebody else?"}]]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"None of what follows is legal advice. It is the shape of the problem. A lawyer in your own country is the person who answers it for your case."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"one-was-the-model-trained-lawfully","runs":[{"text":"One: was the model trained lawfully"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Live litigation, several countries, no settled answer. Getty sued Stability in the US and the UK. Artists have brought class actions in the US. Publishers and image libraries have brought proceedings in Europe. Some cases have narrowed, some have settled quietly, none has produced a clean rule."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"You will not resolve this and you do not have to. What you can do is decide how much exposure to it you want to carry, which leads to the tools that offer indemnity, below."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"two-are-you-licensed-to-use-the-model","runs":[{"text":"Two: are you licensed to use the model"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"This one has a definite answer and you can look it up in two minutes. It is lesson one’s licence trap."}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"Open weights carry a licence. Apache 2.0 releases such as FLUX.1 [schnell] and Qwen-Image permit commercial use. FLUX.1 [dev] does not. Stability’s recent community licence is free below a revenue threshold and paid above it."}],[{"text":"Hosted tools carry terms of service, and free tiers frequently restrict commercial use where paid tiers do not."}]]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"These positions were accurate in 2025 and they change. Read the model card or terms page on the day the job starts."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"three-do-you-own-the-output","runs":[{"text":"Three: do you own the output"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Genuinely unsettled, and different by country. The short version:"}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"The United States","b":true},{"text":" requires human authorship. Prompts alone do not make you an author. Your own expressive contributions (a drawing you fed in, your edits, your arrangement) can be protected."}],[{"text":"The United Kingdom","b":true},{"text":" and a group of jurisdictions with similar provisions, including India, deem the author of a computer-generated work to be the person who made the arrangements for its creation."}],[{"text":"China’s","b":true},{"text":" Beijing Internet Court reached the opposite conclusion to the US on similar facts, finding protection where the user’s choices showed personal intellectual investment."}],[{"text":"The European Union","b":true},{"text":" has no harmonised answer and its member states are working it through."}]]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The same image can be unprotectable in one country and protected in another. "},{"text":"Making things with AI","href":"https://addaly.com/learn/making-things-with-ai"},{"text":" sets out the cases in detail."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The practical consequences: a prompt is not property, “you own your outputs” in a tool’s terms is a promise not to claim it rather than a right the company can create, and for a logo you should route around the problem entirely: trademark protects a mark through use and registration however it was drawn."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"four-does-it-infringe-somebody-else","runs":[{"text":"Four: does it infringe somebody else"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"This is the risk that actually bites, and it is the one people ask about least. A recognisable cartoon character, a real person’s face, a trade dress, a style so specific it names a living artist. That exposure exists whether a human or a model drew it."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Indemnification","b":true},{"text":" is what Adobe, Getty and Shutterstock offer on business plans: if a claim arrives about the training data behind their generator, they will stand behind it. Read the exclusions. It covers what the model learned from. It does not cover you prompting a famous mouse."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"labelling-moving-fast-in-one-direction","runs":[{"text":"Labelling: moving fast, in one direction"}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"China","b":true},{"text":" has required both a visible label and a metadata label on synthetic content since September 2025, with a duty on platforms to check."}],[{"text":"India","b":true},{"text":" amended its IT Rules for synthetically generated information and prescribed "},{"text":"visibility","i":true},{"text":": a label covering a defined portion of the frame and the opening portion of audio, plus a platform duty to verify user declarations."}],[{"text":"The European Union’s","b":true},{"text":" AI Act requires machine-readable marking of generated output and disclosure of deepfakes; the timetable has been amended more than once, so check the current position."}],[{"text":"The United States","b":true},{"text":" has no general federal labelling law, a 2025 statute on non-consensual intimate imagery, and a patchwork of state election rules."}]]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The technical layer (C2PA Content Credentials, and invisible watermarks such as Google’s SynthID) is real and fragile. A screenshot destroys it. Many re-uploads strip it. It is worth attaching and it is not a substitute for a label a person can see."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"the-line-for-telling-a-client","runs":[{"text":"The line for telling a client"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Tell them, in writing, whenever a reasonable viewer could take the image as a record of something real: a person, a place, a product’s actual appearance, a customer, an event. Tell them also when they will license the asset onward, because the ownership question becomes theirs and they need to know what they are selling."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"One line in the delivery note does it:"}]},{"t":"quote","runs":[{"text":"Assets 3, 5 and 7 are AI-generated. They do not depict real people or real events. Generated with [tool] under [plan]; source files and settings supplied."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"That sentence has never lost anybody a job. Discovering it later has."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Today: write that line into your own delivery template, before you need it."}]}],"check":{"question":[{"text":"An agency in India delivers a generated photograph of a smiling “customer” for a client’s testimonial page, with no label, arguing that the tool’s terms grant them ownership of outputs so there is nothing to disclose. 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