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Can I Sell AI-Generated Content? Ownership & Commercial-Use Checker

Pick your AI tool, plan tier, and how you want to use the output. This checker tells you who owns it and whether you can use or sell it commercially, with the exact conditions and a link to each provider's Terms. Covers 16 tools across text, image, music, video and voice. Informational, not legal advice.

By Induwara AshinsanaUpdated Jul 9, 2026
Check who owns your AI output

Plain-English summaries of each provider's public Terms, general information, not legal advice. Terms change; always open the linked official Terms before you ship. Verified 2026-07-09.

Plan tier

Only the tiers this tool documents are shown.

Intended use

Midjourney · Free · Image

A paid plan is required for commercial use.

Conditions apply
Who owns the output

You, with a non-exclusive licence back to the provider

Commercial use

Commercial use requires a paid plan

Conditions

  • Commercial ownership requires an active paid plan.
  • Non-paid output is licensed CC BY-NC 4.0, a non-exclusive grant back to Midjourney.
  • Companies over USD 1M annual revenue must be on the Pro/Mega tier.
  • IP indemnity from the provider: not offered.

Copyrightability, general information, not legal advice

Owning the output is separate from holding copyright in it. The U.S. Copyright Office guidance states that material generated purely by AI, without meaningful human authorship, may not qualify for copyright registration, even when the provider assigns you ownership of the file. Rules differ by country. This is general information, not legal advice.

Read the exact clause in Midjourney's Terms

Compare all tools

ToolModalityOwns outputCommercial usePaid planIndemnitySource
ChatGPT (text)TextYouAllowed—Terms
ClaudeTextYouAllowed—Terms
GeminiTextYouAllowed——Terms
Microsoft CopilotTextYouAllowed—Terms
DALL·E / GPT ImageImageYouAllowed——Terms
MidjourneyImageYouAllowedRequired—Terms
Adobe FireflyImageYouAllowed—Terms
IdeogramImageYouAllowedRequired—Terms
Leonardo.AiImageYouAllowed——Terms
Stable Diffusion (Stability AI)ImageYouAllowed——Terms
SunoMusicYouAllowedRequired—Terms
UdioMusicYouAllowedRequired—Terms
ElevenLabsVoiceYouAllowed——Terms
RunwayVideoYouAllowedRequired—Terms
OpenAI SoraVideoYouAllowed——Terms
Google VeoVideoYouAllowed——Terms

Each row links the provider's official Terms. Ownership and commercial-use cells are quoted from those Terms as of 2026-07-09; the full source list is below the tool. This is general information, not legal advice.

How it works

This is a lookup-and-decision tool, not a calculator. Each generative-AI tool is a record with one or more plan tiers, and every tier stores two facts taken straight from that provider's published Terms: who owns the output and whether commercial use is permitted. Ownership is one of four states. You own it; you own it but grant a non-exclusive licence back to the provider; the provider owns it; or the Terms are silent. The tool never guesses: where a provider says nothing, the cell reads "Not stated, check the Terms."

Your intended use then decides the traffic-light chip. The mapping is deterministic:

  • Allowed → green for any use, including resale (unless the Terms specifically forbid reselling the output as stock).
  • Paid-plan only→ green if your selected tier is already a paid one, or amber ("upgrade required") on the free tier. This is the Midjourney and Suno free-tier case.
  • Restricted→ amber for personal, own-business and client use, and red for "Resale as a product" when the Terms limit commercial use, as with ElevenLabs' free voice tier.
  • Not stated → grey, with a prompt to verify directly with the provider before you rely on it.

Alongside the verdict, the card shows a separate copyrightability note, keyed to the modality and citing the U.S. Copyright Office guidance on the human-authorship requirement. It is labelled "general information, not legal advice" because owning a file and holding copyright in it are two different questions: OpenAI can assign you a DALL·E image while that image may still not qualify for copyright registration in some countries. To keep the dataset honest, the build runs an internal cross-check. It re-derives every tier's commercial-use verdict a second way, from the recorded clause flags alone, and asserts the two methods agree. The "16 tools · 32tiers cross-checked" badge means all of them reconcile. Everything runs in your browser over a static, hand-verified dataset, no API calls, no scraping of live Terms.

Worked examples

Colombo freelancer: a Midjourney logo for a Rs 40,000 client job, free tier

  1. Inputs → Tool: Midjourney, Tier: Free, Use: Client deliverable.
  2. Ownership: "You, with a non-exclusive licence back to Midjourney."
  3. Commercial use: paid-only. Tier is Free ⇒ status chip = AMBER.
  4. Conditions: commercial ownership needs a paid plan; free output is CC BY-NC 4.0;
  5. companies over USD 1M revenue need Pro/Mega.
  6. Verdict: ⚠️ upgrade to a paid plan before delivering the logo.

E-commerce shop: GPT Image product photos to sell on merch, paid tier

  1. Inputs → Tool: DALL·E / GPT Image, Tier: Paid, Use: Resale as a product.
  2. Ownership: "You own the output."
  3. Commercial use: allowed. No stock-resale ban ⇒ status chip = GREEN.
  4. Standing condition: follow the OpenAI Usage Policies.
  5. Copyright note (image): OpenAI assigns you the file, but a purely AI image
  6. may not itself be copyrightable, a separate question.
  7. Verdict: ✅ own it and resell it; the file's copyright status is distinct.

Edge case, musician demos a track on Suno's free tier for a paid gig

  1. Inputs → Tool: Suno, Tier: Free, Use: My own business.
  2. Ownership: "The provider owns the output" (Suno retains free-tier songs).
  3. Commercial use: paid-only. Tier is Free ⇒ status chip = AMBER.
  4. Conditions: free-tier songs are personal, non-commercial;
  5. ownership + commercial rights need Pro/Premier.
  6. Verdict: ⚠️ regenerate on a paid plan before using it commercially.

Frequently asked questions

Sources & references

Each tool's ownership and commercial-use cells were last cross-checked against its official Terms on 2026-07-09. Provider Terms change often, this page tracks the current published version, not a historical changelog. It is informational and does not cover trademark clearance, training-data disputes, or country-specific case law, and is not a substitute for legal advice.

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Comments & feedback

Spotted a bug or want an improvement? Tell us, our team reviews every comment, and good ideas get built. Comments are public and anonymous.

Spotted a provider whose Terms changed, or a tool we should add?

Email me at [email protected] , most fixes ship within 24 hours.