The Half of Your Stock Photo Nobody Licensed You

Ownership Does Not Extend to the Part You Generated

The intuition is that if you paid for the image and you ran the tool, the result is yours. Copyright does not work that way. Protection attaches to human authorship, and purely machine-generated material is excluded from it — a work can be registered with such material inside it, but the registration has to disclaim the generated portion and covers only what a person actually contributed.

Applied to an expanded stock photo, that yields an awkward three-way split. The photographer or agency holds rights in the original frame. You hold, at most, rights in your own creative choices — the crop, the composition, the selection and arrangement. The generated region belongs to nobody. If a competitor lifts your expanded hero image, your claim runs on the parts you can point to as human work, not on the pixels the model invented.

For most marketing use that is tolerable. It stops being tolerable when the asset is a product mark, a packaging element, a character you intend to reuse, or anything you plan to enforce against a copycat.

The Licence and the AI Clause Can Contradict Each Other

Two clauses in the same stock agreement pull in opposite directions. A modification clause permits you to alter the asset for the licensed use. A separate restriction — added to most major agreements in the last two years — prohibits using the asset with machine learning or generative systems. Read literally, running an image through generative fill is using it with a generative system, and the fact that you were not training anything does not always appear in the drafting.

This is not a theoretical reading problem. It determines whether your entire campaign is licensed. Three practical moves:

• Pull the current terms, not the ones you read in 2023. These clauses have been revised repeatedly and the version that governs is the one in force when you licensed the asset.
• Ask the account manager in writing. Agencies have internal positions on generative editing and will state them by email. That email is the artefact you want on file.
• Prefer vendors with an explicit generative offering. Where the vendor sells generated or generatively-edited output with its own licence and indemnity, the question is answered in the product rather than in your interpretation.

Where the Indemnity Stops

The commercial reason businesses buy stock rather than scraping the web is the indemnity. It is also the protection most reliably voided by generative editing, because it is conventionally scoped to the asset as delivered, used as permitted, and carved out for modifications and for combination with other content.

The risk that indemnity was covering does not disappear when the cover does. A generative model asked to extend a scene can reproduce a recognisable building, a trademark on a shopfront, a distinctive product silhouette, or a style close enough to a living artist's to attract a demand letter. In an expanded background these arrive unnoticed, because nobody reviews invented background detail with the care they apply to the subject.

The Release Problem Is the Underrated One

Copyright is the risk everyone discusses. Publicity rights are the one that produces the angrier plaintiff. A model release documents consent to a specific depiction. Generative editing routinely alters that depiction: putting a person in a different setting, placing a branded product in their hand, changing clothing, or extending a group shot with synthetic people who then appear to be colleagues, patients or customers.

The categories where this turns expensive are predictable — health conditions, financial distress, addiction, political messaging, endorsement of a product. A stock model who consented to a generic office photograph did not consent to appearing to endorse your debt product, and the release will not say they did.

A Workable Policy for a Marketing Team

1. Separate the two operations. Cropping, colour and format conversion are ordinary licensed modification. Generative fill, expand, object removal and object insertion are a different category and should be logged as such.
2. Ban generative editing on editorial and on releases involving identifiable people unless legal has cleared the specific asset. These are the two fact patterns that produce claims rather than arguments.
3. Keep the original file and the receipt. Alongside the prompt, the tool and version, the masked region and the export. This is the evidence pack for a registration disclaimer or a client audit.
4. Review invented regions for third-party content. Logos, signage, buildings, recognisable products, and anything that looks like a real person. Zoom to full resolution; the artefacts that generate letters are small.
5. Write the disclosure rule once. If the modification changes what a viewer would believe about the product, the setting or the people, label it. Then apply that rule consistently rather than per campaign.
6. Fix the contract language downstream. If you are an agency delivering to clients, your warranty about the deliverable should match what you actually hold — which is not clear title to a synthetic region.

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