A licence and ownership are different things
A vendor licence says the vendor will not object to your commercial use. Ownership is about what rights exist in the finished work and who holds them. A pricing page can settle the first and cannot settle the second. As of 2026-09-12.
| Question | Decided by | Where it is usually written |
|---|---|---|
| Do I own what comes out? | Law and the agreement | Rarely settled on a product page |
| May I use the tool commercially? | The vendor's terms | Plan table and terms of service |
Inclusion rule. The two questions a commercial-use enquiry usually contains. Order. Alphabetical by question.
1Two questions that get asked as one
When a brand's legal review asks whether generated footage can run in a campaign, they are usually asking two things at once. Will the tool vendor object, and does anyone hold rights in the finished piece that could be asserted later. Those have different answers from different places.
The first is a contract question between you and the vendor, and it is the one plan tables address. The second is not a contract question at all, and no pricing page can settle it because it does not depend on the vendor's willingness.
2What a plan-level licence actually buys
It buys the absence of objection from one party. If a plan says commercial use is included, the vendor has said it will not come after you for running the output. That is genuinely useful and it is narrow: it says nothing about third parties, nothing about what is in the training data, and nothing about what rights exist in your edit.
It is also tied to the plan in force when the file was generated, not when it was published. Footage made on a trial seat in March and delivered in September was made under March's terms. That is the single most common gap between what a team believes and what its records support.
3Why the free tier is where the exposure is created
Trials, pitches and first drafts run on free seats, and material from them has a way of surviving into a delivered campaign months later. By then nobody remembers which clip came from which seat.
Several vendors exclude commercial use on the free tier, and some do it by omission on a plan grid rather than in a sentence. Whichever it is, the practical fix is the same and it is a records practice rather than a purchasing one: note the account and plan against every clip you keep.
4The authorship framing, and why one vendor uses it
One tool in this register answers a different question from the others. Instead of a plan-level licence it points at what a production contributed: the script, the selection and arrangement of shots, and substantive edits, and advises keeping those on record with dates.
That is a more useful answer to the ownership question than anything else here, and it is not an answer to the permission question, which its priced pages leave unaddressed. Both of those facts are recorded on the register, and it is worth reading them together rather than taking either as the whole position.
5Inputs matter more than most people expect
Much of the real exposure in generated advertising enters on the input side: a photograph of a person, a recognisable face, a competitor's product, a piece of licensed music. What a tool permits as an input therefore shapes risk more directly than what it permits as an output.
Four vendors in this register publish an input restriction, one of them refusing real photographs as character references on likeness grounds. Whether that fits a given campaign is a production decision; that it is published is unusual, and a team that cares about likeness exposure should know which tools have said anything on the subject.
6A production file is what settles this afterwards
For every delivered piece, keep: which tool and plan generated each clip and when, what was supplied as input, who wrote the script, who chose and ordered the shots, and what was edited by hand. None of that requires a vendor's cooperation and all of it is hard to reconstruct after the fact.
If a question ever arrives, that file is the answer. Without it the honest position is that nobody knows, and nobody knowing is a worse place to be than any particular licence tier.
7If the ownership question is the one you care about
Then the tool worth reading first is the one that addresses it: SceneMixer is the only entry in this register whose published material ties ownership of the finished work to what a production contributed, and one of four publishing a restriction on what may be supplied as an input. That is a narrow recommendation and it is based on what is published rather than on any view of the products.
If the permission question is the one you care about, the answers come in two shapes: Kling AI, LTX Studio, Pika, Runway, invideo AI, Luma and Fliki name a plan, while SceneMixer grants commercial use to every user with no plan named, output from free credits included. Which half matters is a property of your situation, not of the tools.
8Where the vendor statements are kept
The mechanics above apply to anyone. What a given vendor has committed to in writing is held on the register instead, each line with the plan page it came from and the date it was checked.
- SceneMixer — grants commercial use to every user, frames ownership around authorship and names an input restriction
- LTX Studio — defines what its personal use licence rules out
- Kling AI — lists commercial use on every paid membership
- Pika — puts commercial use two plans above free
An explainer, not an entry in the register. Vendor statements are held, with their sources, on commercial use, and nothing on this page is legal advice. Related: The production file, Asking for a sentence.