Here is a sentence that makes everyone feel warm and cozy: “You retain ownership rights in your content.” Almost all platform’s terms of service include some version of this, and in each case, it is technically true. The copyright is yours. You can register it, license it elsewhere, and sue an infringer who is not the platform.
Then comes “however,” and for anyone still paying attention, the coziness quickly turns sour.
Because everything after “however” marks a material reduction in the rights that looked so robust a moment earlier. For those thinking this is a bunch of worrywartism, check out last week’s headlines.
Kogon et al. v. Google LLC
Billboard reported that Google, in a motion to dismiss filed June 8 of this year, argued that YouTube’s terms of service grant a “broad license” that covers training its AI models on the music people upload. In other words, Google’s defense is not “we did not use your songs, ”nor “we used them, but it was fair use.” Instead, Google is pointing to its terms of service and arguing, “you gave us permission.”
The case is Kogon et al. v. Google LLC, in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. A coalition of independent artists, songwriters, and producers (among them Sam Kogon, Magnus Fiennes, Michael Mell, the R&B group Attack the Sound, and the band Directrix) filed a 118-page complaint alleging that Google trained its Lyria 3 music model, and its ProducerAI tool, on songs that users had uploaded to YouTube without a license or payment. The complaint claims that Google copied an enormous volume of work (it alleges tens of millions of clips and hundreds of thousands of hours of music), and it leans heavily on a structural argument: Google owns the platform where these artists distribute, runs the Content ID system that identifies who owns what, and then allegedly used both to build a product that competes with the very creators who trusted it. The plaintiffs frame this as a pivot from distributor to competitor, otherwise known as vertical integration. They further allege that Google stripped copyright management information from the works, which is a no-no under the DMCA.
Whether a court agrees with Google’s “broad license” reading is still unsettled, and the artists will file their opposition to Google’s motion in the coming weeks.
This case highlights a crucial point for every creator, musician or otherwise: the everyday “boilerplate” terms you scrolled past with one eye closed at signup are now being argued, in federal court, as your consent to AI training, among other things. That is why it is important that creators understand the terms before they upload, not after.
The license grant. Six words that gobble up your rights:
- Territory. Often the license here is “worldwide,” or even “throughout the universe,” meaning there is no geographic limit. Obvious, but it means there is nowhere on the planet (or otherwise) that your content is off-limits to them.
- Exclusivity. These licenses are all non-exclusive, meaning the platform is not your exclusive distributor. You can still license the same work to someone else, but you cannot grant anyone else an exclusive license to the same rights you have already granted the platform unless you terminate the terms (which generally requires ceasing use of the platform).
- Consideration. These licenses tend to be “fully paid up” and “royalty-free,” which means the platform is not paying you for the license. Instead, they are permitting you to use the platform in exchange for these rights. Any money you make comes from a separate monetization program with its own rules.
- Sublicensability. These licenses are usually sublicensable, which means the platform can sublicense its rights to someone else, such as an affiliate or business partner.
- Transferability. These licenses are also usually transferable, which means they can be assigned to or sold to another company, which matters a great deal during an acquisition.
- Term and revocability. “Irrevocable” and “perpetual.” When you see one or both of these words, pay close attention. Two grants can use almost identical adjectives and mean wildly different things depending on which of these two words appear. They typically mean the license does not end when you delete the content. It lasts forever. No takebacks. More on that below, because not every platform uses them, which tells you something about the ones that do.
A few platforms, a few clauses worth noticing.
What follows is a quick, illustrative tour, not an exhaustive review. For each platform flagged are just one or two clauses worth noticing, the kind that should shape where creators put their most valuable work, rather than a full read of the terms. The point is to give creators an idea of some of the things hiding in the fine print, so they know what to look for before they upload.
YouTube: an AI opt-in that does not cover Google. YouTube’s content license is the standard model, but the clause worth noticing is its third-party AI training setting. It lets creators opt in to having named AI companies train on their videos, which sounds protective, until you realize it does not touch Google’s own training. Google still trains its own models, including Gemini and Veo, on YouTube content under the existing creator agreement, and you cannot switch that off. (A close second to watch: the new Gemini-powered Shorts Remix tool lets others reimagine creator Shorts.)
Roblox: the terms say “machine learning” out loud. Roblox is the rare platform that names AI training in the text itself. Publish user-generated content inside another creator’s experience and you grant Roblox and that experience’s creator a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable license that runs, in the terms’ own words, to “the training, development, and use of machine learning and related models,” with no obligation to pay you. Perpetual and irrevocable mean the grant does not end when a creator deletes their content, which is worth understanding before publishing your best assets there.
TikTok: ownership you keep, derivatives you do not. TikTok’s grant may be the most expansive of the bunch. The creator keeps the copyright, but the license is perpetual, irrevocable, and sublicensable. It reaches the creator’s name, image, likeness, voice, and voiceprint, and it extends to every other user of the platform, who can adapt and make derivative works of creator content. TikTok can generate AI derivatives of creator content and owns them, those derivatives can exist without the creator’s original ever being visible, and deletion will not reach anything already woven into someone else’s posts. Posting there is a decision to license your likeness on terms you cannot later revoke.
Snapchat: the public/private split. Snapchat is the cleanest example of why the answer depends on what and where a creator uploads. Ordinary Snaps get a limited operational license. But anything that a creator puts on a public surface (Spotlight, Public Stories, Snap Map, Public Profiles, Lens Studio) becomes “Public Content” under an unrestricted, perpetual, irrevocable license, and that license reaches the name, image, likeness, and voice of anyone featured in the content, with the terms stating explicitly that the creator of the content not entitled to compensation. For creators whose face and voice are the product, that means right-of-publicity vulnerability.
Twitch: the danger is the music, not the license. On Twitch the issues are often not the content license, but the soundtrack. A creator’s personal Spotify or Apple Music subscription is a listening license, not a broadcast license, so playing that music on stream is a copyright violation that Twitch’s audio detection will flag, often in a creator’s VODs after the fact. The bigger risk is a DMCA strike: unlike other strikes, these do not run on a tidy clock, and enough of them can end a creator’s channel.
Instagram: the sublicensing surprise. Instagram’s license is the familiar shape and, reassuringly, ends when the creator deletes content from its systems (a process that begins within thirty days). The clause worth noticing is “sub-licensable.” A line of New York cases (Sinclair, McGucken) tested whether posting publicly lets Instagram sublicense your image to sites that embed it, and the embedders’ argument was not frivolous, though Instagram has said, for now, that its embed API is not meant to grant such a sublicense. That said, it still has the power to grant such a sublicense, which should be troubling especially for photographers and other creators whose images are their livelihood.
LinkedIn: trains AI by default. If you are reading this on LinkedIn, note this one. The license is ordinary, but as of November 3, 2025, LinkedIn began using member data and public content to train its content-generating AI by default, sharing with its parent Microsoft. LinkedIn users are opted in unless they turn off “Data for Generative AI Improvement” in Settings. Two catches: the toggle only covers content-generating AI (other models require a separate objection form), and opting out only stops future use, not what was already processed.
Substack: the friendliest terms in the room. Substack is the counterexample and a useful benchmark. Its terms open by saying that creators own what they create, the license is non-exclusive so creators can republish anywhere, and, crucially, creators can export their subscriber list and take their audience with them. One thing worth noting even here though: the license Substack takes is still perpetual and irrevocable, so “you own it” and “the grant ends when you leave” are not the same thing.
Yes, your hands are mostly tied. Here is what to do anyway:
There is an obvious objection to everything above, and it is a fair one: what choice does a creator actually have? Almost none of this is negotiable. Platform terms are contracts of adhesion, drafted entirely by one side and handed to you on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. You cannot redline YouTube’s license. You cannot call Snap and ask them to strike the perpetual-likeness clause. And “leave it” is rarely a meaningful option, because the same companies that wrote these terms are also how creators reach their audience and earn their living. Walking away from the terms means walking away from distribution and monetization at a scale most creators cannot rebuild alone.
So, the useful question is not “do I accept these terms?” You generally have to. The useful question is “how do I protect myself while accepting them?”
Here are some suggestions for protecting both your content and your access to your audience:
Own the relationship with your audience, not just the work. The terms can license your content, throttle your reach, or close your account, but they cannot touch the followers you can reach directly. An email list, a website you control, a portable subscriber list like Substack’s: that is the one asset no platform license reaches, and it is what lets you survive a rule change, a takedown, or a ban.
Do not put your crown jewels where the terms fit them worst. Match the asset to the license. Use the broad-license platforms to test, tease, and drive discovery, and anchor your most valuable, hardest-to-replace IP where you keep the most control, with the canonical version living somewhere you own.
Keep your originals and masters off-platform. The license covers what you uploaded, not the project files, stems, and source assets you never handed over. Archive everything so you can always re-cut, re-release, and license it elsewhere on your own terms.
Register your copyrights. The platform’s license is non-exclusive, so you keep every right against everyone else. In the US, registration is what unlocks statutory damages and your ability to actually sue an infringer who is not the platform.
Use the controls you do have with intention. Set YouTube’s third-party AI training preference and turn off LinkedIn’s “Data for Generative AI Improvement.” Set Shorts remixing before you post, not after.
Clear your input first. Music, footage, fonts, guest likenesses. No platform license protects you from a third party’s claim.
Negotiate the contracts you actually can. You cannot redline a platform’s terms, but the deals stacked on top of them are negotiable: brand and sponsorship agreements, management and agency contracts, collaboration splits, network deals, transmedia deals. That is where you reclaim ownership, sequel rights, your audience data, and limits on AI use. Put the protections the platform refuses you into the agreements you control.
Re-read when things change. These documents update periodically. Recheck them on the platforms carrying your most valuable work or have someone do it for you.
Conclusion
None of this means do not upload. A non-exclusive license is a reasonable trade for reaching an audience you could never assemble on your own, and platforms are not the enemy. They sit on a spectrum, from TikTok’s all-encompassing, irrevocable grant to Substack’s ownership-first terms, and the smart move is simply to know where each platform you use actually falls. Avoiding platforms is almost never the strategy. It is about creator strategy that’s built with the platform’s pros and cons in mind.
Taking the time to review how content may be used, licensed or incorporated into AI systems can help creators make more informed decisions about where and how they share their most valuable assets.
This post is general information for creators, not legal advice, and platform terms change often. The clauses described here are illustrative highlights, not a complete review, and reflect each platform’s current terms and the public record of Kogon v. Google as of writing. If a specific upload, deal, or dispute matters to you, talk to a lawyer who can look at your specific situation.
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