When I started experimenting and setting up text-to-image models that ran locally on my computer to generate unlimited AI images, I already had enough things in my head with the learning curve, that I completely skipped the most important part: the licensing.
There’s a huge problem right now when it comes to copyrighting anything that you’ve created using an AI model. But that doesn’t apply to the companies and developers who publish their own custom models with their own licensing. Those have all the power to prosecute you if you’ve been using commercially anything that was created using their models.
When I already had a well-organized folder with over 200 AI-generated pictures, you can imagine my frustration when I found out that I couldn’t even use half of them because I used a model that didn’t allow commercial usage for the outputs. While that sounds logical, there are many content creators who also skip this part in their articles or videos, and folks who follow them can easily find themselves in trouble.
Let’s say that you want to use a tool like ComfyUI or Easy Diffusion to run text-to-image models and generate as many AI images as you want. Cool. But did you look at the license page before downloading the model?
It doesn’t matter where you download a model; you’ll almost always find a license file or page that explains what you can and can’t do with it. The most popular websites that host such models, including Hugging Face and CivitAI, typically offer a link to the license page, where you can see if you’re allowed to use the outputs commercially.
While there are many text-to-image models that offer commercial licensing for your outputs, many don’t. Some are provided for educational purposes only, others for testing or helping with the training, and you get the point.
You can find many models that are free to use. A great example is Juggernaut, which is a very powerful AI model that you can use to generate highly detailed portraits.
This model, for example, comes under the “CreativeML Open RAIL++-M Addendum” (and in some versions Open RAIL++-M) license, which, if you read it, by default permits commercial use of all images (“Outputs”) you generate.
However, RunDiffusion’s author has attached an addendum, stating that the model is not permitted behind API services and that you should contact juggernaut@rundiffusion.com for any commercial or business-related deployments of the model itself.
This is only if you want to use the model for purposes like creating a website or an app, and use Juggernaut as the main model to generate all the outputs, and not for your images or videos.
If, for some reason, you receive a lawsuit for selling images generated by Juggernaut XL, your primary defense will center on the CreativeML Open RAIL-M/++-M license, which explicitly disclaims any rights in the model outputs, granting you perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free commercial rights to use and sell those images.
You can also seek a declaratory judgment to confirm your rights, invoke DMCA safe-harbor provisions if applicable, and explore settlement or insurance options.
But you cannot do all those things if the model that you’re using is released under a different license that doesn’t allow you to sell your outputs. Some of them are just for educational purposes, others are just for testing and improving, and others are free for personal use with the option to buy a commercial license.
In a world where everyone’s building new AI tools and pre-trained models, it’s easy to miss a license and find yourself in a lot of legal trouble. You need to be careful, read everything, and if you don’t understand something, ask your lawyer.
Another excellent choice is to use an AI chatbot like ChatGPT, Microsoft CoPilot, or DeepSeek to break down the whole licensing part and explain it in simple words. But even so, make sure you also check it manually.
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