Output licence terms compared across generators
Assignment, licence-back, revenue thresholds, IP warranties and indemnity availability differ by generator. The five clauses to read before a deliverable.
The headline is identical everywhere: you own what you make. The documents underneath are not identical, and the differences show up at exactly the wrong moment, which is when a client's legal team asks a specific question about a file you delivered three weeks ago.
What follows is a map of the clauses that actually differ, and what each one does to a deliverable. It is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for reading the version of the terms that applied on the day you generated. Terms change without a press release, and the grant that matters is the one in force at generation time, not the one on the site today.
The five clauses that decide anything
Everything else in an output licence is boilerplate. These five change outcomes.
1. Assignment or bare licence. An assignment transfers whatever rights the provider holds in the output to you. A bare licence leaves the rights with the provider and permits you to use the output within stated limits. The practical difference appears when you try to sublicense to a client: you can pass on what you were assigned, and you generally cannot pass on more than your own licence allows.
2. The licence back. Almost every consumer generator takes a licence back over your outputs, and sometimes your prompts and inputs, for purposes ranging from operating the service to promoting it. Scope is what matters. A narrow licence to store and transmit your files so the product can function is unremarkable. A broad, perpetual, sublicensable grant that permits public display of your work is a different thing to have agreed to on behalf of a client whose product shots are in it.
3. Plan and revenue gating. Rights are frequently tiered. Midjourney's terms condition asset ownership for paid subscribers on revenue-threshold tiering, meaning a business above a stated revenue line sits under different obligations from a solo user on the same feature. The trap is upgrading later: rights are rarely applied retroactively, so a file generated under one tier usually stays under that tier's grant even after you move up.
4. IP warranties, and their disclaimers. A warranty is the provider stating that the output does not infringe. Consumer terms usually disclaim this explicitly. Midjourney's consumer-plan terms disclaim IP warranties. Reading a disclaimer as neutral is a mistake — it is the provider telling you, in writing, that the infringement question is yours.
5. Indemnity availability, and its conditions. An indemnity is the provider agreeing to defend and cover you if a third party sues over the output. Where these exist they are generally attached to enterprise and API tiers, not consumer plans, and they come with conditions attached.
How the major generators differ
| Provider | Output rights to you | Licence back | Tiering | Warranty / indemnity posture |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | Terms of Use assign OpenAI's right, title and interest in Output to the user; commercial use permitted across plans | Present, per the terms in force | Commercial use not gated by plan | Do not assume a consumer-tier indemnity; confirm in your own agreement |
| Midjourney | Paid subscribers own their assets | Broad licence back to Midjourney | Revenue-threshold tiering applies | Consumer-plan terms disclaim IP warranties |
| Adobe Firefly | Commercial use on qualifying plans | Per plan terms | Indemnity gated to qualifying commercial and enterprise plans | IP indemnification offered on those plans; caps and conditions are contract-specific |
| Google, Microsoft, Anthropic | Per product terms | Per product terms | Enterprise and API tiers | Copyright indemnities generally enterprise or API tier, conditioned on using safety filters |
Two things about that table are more important than any individual cell.
The first is that the indemnity column is the only one that changes what happens when something goes wrong, and it is the column most likely to be different from what you assume. For Adobe specifically, the caps and conditions vary by contract and there is no published figure worth planning around. Read the agreement you signed.
The second is that the table describes the relationship between you and the provider. None of it binds a third party. A studio whose character appears in your output never agreed to any of these documents.
The limit the table cannot show
A provider can only assign the rights it holds. Where the human-authorship test fails, there may be no copyright in the output for anyone to assign, so the strongest possible assignment clause conveys an empty set. That is a statutory limit no vendor can draft around, and it is the reason "you own the output" and "the output is protectable" are separate claims. If a deliverable needs to be defensible rather than merely usable, the work is to create and document human selection, arrangement and modification, which is a production decision rather than a contract one. The background on how that test is applied sits in the AI copyright and safety guide.
The second limit is that none of these terms stop a third-party claim. They allocate rights between two parties who signed. Everyone else retains whatever claims they had, which is why the training-provenance question keeps mattering even after you have a clean commercial grant — the argument for treating it as a purchasing criterion is in licensed training data as a buying criterion.
Where an aggregator sits in the stack
If you generate through a platform that routes to multiple providers, there are two documents in play, not one. The platform's terms govern your account. The underlying provider's terms still govern the model that produced the file.
Versely's terms state this directly: generated content may be used for personal and commercial purposes subject to these terms and the applicable third-party AI provider terms, with the user responsible for ensuring compliance with applicable law. That is the honest structure. It means the model you picked is part of your rights position, not just a quality decision, and it is one reason the model catalog publishes what each model is rather than presenting the roster as interchangeable.
Practically, that turns model selection into a rights decision at the point of generation. Head-to-head comparisons are useful for output quality; the licence question needs the provider's own terms alongside them. Open-weight models are a separate case again, because the licence attaches to the weights and travels with them regardless of who hosts the inference — that is unpacked in open-weight video licences and what you can ship.
A pre-delivery check that takes ten minutes
Run this before a deliverable leaves the building, not after a question arrives:
- Name the model and version that produced each file, with the date. Without this, nothing else on the list can be answered.
- Pull the provider terms in force on that date, not today's. If you cannot get the historical version, record which version you relied on.
- Confirm the grant covers the media plan. "Commercial use" in a vendor's terms is routinely narrower than a media plan assumes. Paid social, broadcast, in-store, cinema and DSP distribution are often separate grants.
- Check the licence back against client confidentiality. If the client's unreleased product is in the frame, a broad promotional licence back is a conversation you need to have had already.
- Write the assignment you can actually perform. If the deliverable is AI-assisted, the contract language should describe what you can convey. The vocabulary for that is in usage rights, and the tiering patterns agencies actually use are in usage rights in creator contracts.
Boring, repeatable, and it converts an unanswerable question into a lookup.
FAQ
Do I need to re-check terms for every generation?
No. Check per provider, per plan, and re-check when you change plans or when a provider announces terms changes. What you do need per generation is the record — model, version, date, account — because that is what lets you match a file to the terms that governed it. Capturing it at generation time costs nothing; reconstructing it later is expensive and often impossible.
Does a paid plan make output safe for advertising?
It usually makes the grant from the vendor to you commercial, which is necessary and not sufficient. Two things sit outside it: whether the output reproduces someone else's protected material, and whether disclosure obligations are met for each destination the ad runs on. Those are separate checks, and the second one is covered in AI ad disclosure compliance.
If a provider disclaims IP warranties, should I stop using it?
Not necessarily. It should change what you use it for. Disclaimed warranties plus no indemnity is a fine posture for internal work, concepting, organic social and low-exposure assets. It is a poor posture for a hero campaign with a media budget behind it, where the cost of being wrong is large enough to justify either a tier with an indemnity or a different production route.
Which clause causes the most trouble in practice?
The licence back, because nobody reads it and it is the one with a third party's interests inside it. An agency that agrees to a broad promotional licence over outputs containing a client's unreleased product has created an exposure that no amount of good work downstream fixes. Check it once per vendor and write the answer down.