Platform Terms of Service: What Creators Are Giving Away to Apps, AI & AI Users
HOW INSTAGRAM, TIK-TOK & YOUTUBE ARE USING YOUR CONTENT & HOW TO SECURE OWNERSHIP, CONTROL & PROTECTION OF YOUR WORK
KEY INSIGHTS
• Based on a single click to “accept the terms,” creators are giving platforms the right to copy, share, modify, and use their content and feed it to AI—without compensating creators or providing notice for how (or where) the content is being used.
• Most Terms suggest that creators retain ownership, control, and protection on their platform, but they don’t—not practically or legally.
• Creators haven’t lost their power—they can regain ownership, control, and protection of their work through an integrated framework that operates wholly apart from the platforms.
Before we get into it, let’s call out the elephant in the room:
We all do it.
We all click the button, accept the terms, and post our most valuable assets to the very platforms that were built to serve creative entrepreneurs like us. I do it too. Whether it’s Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, or another, there’s only one way to participate and only one tiny click-box action to gain full access.
But since I’m a lawyer (and it’s my job to draft and negotiate terms like these) I did read the fine print . . . every “including but not limited to,” every dense paragraph, and every sweeping relinquishment of my legal rights . . .
. . . and still clicked the button.Just like we all do.
Because it’s not a negotiation—it’s part of the fixed fee for building business as a creative entrepreneur. That is, until one of us builds something better. Until then—here we are. So we might as well figure out how to work around the system. Because—yes—there is a way to work around the system. But creators need to understand what they’re giving to these platforms so they know how to work around them.
WHAT THE PLATFORMS ARE ACTUALLY DOING
In case you haven’t had the chance to curl up on the couch with a steaming cup of coffee, a cozy blanket, and some easy weekend reading called All the Platform Terms You Never Read, I’d like to offer what I recently offered to a client. She told me she’d rather poke an eye out than read those terms, so I offered a 90-second summary. Because, sure, the info is important, but not worth a eye. Or a cozy weekend. So here you go.
LEGAL 101 FOR CREATORS IN 90 SECONDS — PLATFORM T&Cs
Every major platform used by creators in their day-to-day business has its own Terms & Conditions (aka T&Cs, Terms of Use, Terms of Service, and other iterations), but they all serve the same core purpose: to outline legal rights and expectations between the platform and the user. As you would expect, these terms are drafted with a high degree of technical detail, contain an obnoxious amount of legalese, are excruciatingly boring, entirely one-sided, and non-negotiable.
When you click to accept the terms, a legally binding contract is formed that does three primary things:
Provides information the platform is legally required to provide;
Limits the platform’s liability; and
Allows the platform to use your information and content for a vast number of uses without any additional notice or approval.
Many of the platforms actually grant themselves a license to your content, which is a contractual method of transferring ownership and control of intellectual property. Other platforms avoid licensing language, preferring to ground their use as a permissive type of borrowing rather than a proprietary taking. But either way, the outcome is the same: any information you provide, any content you upload, and anything you draft or create on the platform can be used, copied, shared, displayed, and modified by the platform or third parties, including Artificial Intelligence companies that use your content to train AI models.
As a result, portions of the creator’s work could show up places they would never independently authorize—such as marketing materials the creator does not endorse or fed into AI models that reproduce the content to downstream AI users without any information identifying the creator as the source.
WHY THIS IS SUCH A BIG DEAL FOR CREATORS
The consequences for independent creators go far beyond any single piece of content. Creators aren’t just building a business. They’re building a body of work through their writing, videos, articles, courses, and all other creative content. And this body of work is the creator’s most valuable asset. Not only does it represent the creator, it’s their credibility, authority, and business income. And that’s what makes their most valuable asset their most vulnerable asset.
The platforms know this, so in their T&Cs, they include language attempting to reassure creators that they “own” what they create, that their work is “protected” under copyright laws, and that they retain certain management rights over their work. But do not be deceived. This—more than anything else—is what creators need to know:
Ownership, control, and protection of their work is not coming from the platform.Ownership, control, and protection of all creator content is the creator’s sole responsibility. Creators can, of course, contract with third parties to handle certain tasks, but no platform is doing any of these things for creators. They’re doing the opposite.
What this means for creators is clear. To build a strong, thriving business in the creator economy, creators have to do for themselves what the platforms never will: secure true ownership,control, and protection of their work.
THE LEGAL FRAMEWORK FOR SECURING OWNERSHIP, CONTROL & PROTECTION
The way creators counteract their risk is by securing ownership, control, and protection of all their assets through an integrated legal framework that exists completely apart from any platform. While the framework operates as integrated whole—just like the creator’s body of work, there are three components to the framework:
Trademark registration ® — to establish ownership and enforceability of their brand assets (name, logo, slogan, and signature programs/offers);
Copyright registration © — to establish ownership and enforceability of their original creative work (writing, artwork, videos, choreography, photography, music, poetry, screenplays, films, and more);
Solid contracts and enforceable terms: to secure ownership, enforceability, and control of all their brand and creative assets, as well as the vast amount of proprietary business content that only be protected by the adoption of integrated agreements and terms (business content, websites, courses, offers, programs, ideas, client lists, email lists, methodologies, memberships, websites, masterminds, and more).
When creators’ work is not secured by registered trademarks ®, registered copyrights ©, and solid T&Cs of their own, they have very little standing to oppose misuse of their work. So if any part of their body of work is fed to an AI user, who then combines your work with their work, the creator faces the next-to-impossible task of proving what’s theirs with no formal, registered evidence and no enforceable terms to do so.
Unfortunately, far too many creators do not understand the necessity—or the power—of securing federal registration and enforceable terms until something happens. However, when creators secure ownership, control, and protection of their work through an integrated legal framework, they not only counteract the platform terms, every part of their business is elevated.
