Who Owns an AI Generated Video, and Can You Sell It?
Two different questions get answered as one. Here is what our terms actually say about the MP4 you download, why copyright over purely AI output is thin, and the rights you still have to clear.
Two separate questions get asked as one. The first is whether the tool lets you use the file: under our terms you retain the rights you hold in what you submit, and, subject to those terms and our providers' policies, the outputs you generate are yours to use, including for client work. The second is whether anyone can be stopped from copying that file, which is a copyright question, and there the honest answer is that protection over purely machine-generated material is thin in most places. Both matter, and only the first one is ours to decide.
What our terms actually say
Section 5 of the terms is the short version: your inputs stay yours, and the outputs are yours to use subject to the terms and to the policies of the underlying AI models. There is no separate commercial licence to buy, no per-seat usage fee, and no tier where the export is restricted to personal use. You pay credits for the generation and the MP4 is the deliverable.
That also means there is no revocation switch pointed at work you have already run. If you make a video for a client this month and cancel next month, the file you downloaded is not affected.
Copyright is a different question
Permission to use something is not the same as owning exclusive rights in it. Several copyright offices, the United States most explicitly, have taken the position that material generated by a machine without meaningful human authorship is not registrable, and that what a human contributes to the work is what can be protected. The UK has an older provision for computer-generated works, and its status has been under review. Positions here are moving, so check the current rule in your own jurisdiction rather than trusting a blog post, ours included.
The practical read for short-form video is undramatic. Your script, your format, your character design and the edit are human choices, and they are the parts worth protecting. Nobody scraping your feed was ever going to be stopped by a registration certificate anyway. If exclusivity in the asset is genuinely load-bearing for a deal, say so in the contract rather than assuming it.
The rights you still have to clear
This is where most of the real risk sits, and none of it is about the tool.
- Likeness. If you upload photos to steer the character towards a real person, you need that person's consent. Generating a recognisable public figure is a problem under our terms and under publicity and privacy law, independently of who owns the output.
- Voice. The synthetic voice is licensed for you to use through the generation. Cloning a specific real person's voice is a separate matter and not something to improvise.
- Motion reference. Supplying a clip drives your character's movement and the source footage does not appear in the export, but you are still responsible for having the right to submit it.
- Claims. An invented character endorsing a purchase they never made is an advertising-law problem in most markets, whether or not the video is disclosed as AI.
What a client hand-off needs
For agency and freelance work the file itself matters as much as the paperwork. What you download is a native 9:16 H.264 MP4 with no watermark, no end card and the metadata stripped, so it does not name its own production chain when the client opens it. We covered exactly what is in that file in the no-watermark post.
Disclosure is still yours to handle at the point of posting. The platform rules on labelling synthetic media are set out in is AI generated content allowed on TikTok.
What this does not do
This is not legal advice and we are not your lawyers. We cannot indemnify you against a claim arising from your inputs, the terms put that responsibility on you, and we cannot tell you how a given jurisdiction will treat a given video. Nor does the tool check whether you had permission for a likeness, a voice or a reference clip.
On the product side: we do not publish or schedule to TikTok, Instagram or YouTube, so the upload and the disclosure are manual. Videos are made one at a time, with multi-variant generation on our roadmap rather than shipped. There is no free trial, so the first generation is paid: a 10 second voiced video is 28 credits, putting Starter at $15 a month at roughly 10 videos and Creator at $30 at roughly 21.
Where to start
Read section 5 of the terms, decide what your contract needs to say about exclusivity, then make a video and look at the file you get. Both questions are easier to answer with the export in front of you.