AI Generated Outputs Policy

Colony's Terms of Service already reflect the correct, industry-standard position, and no change is recommended to the substance of what is drafted:

• •Full ownership of AI-generated Outputs is assigned to the customer, not retained by Colony.
• •This applies uniformly across every pricing tier - Free, Pro, Team, Forager, and Enterprise - with no tier-based distinction.
• •Colony discloses, rather than hides, the reality that AI models can produce similar or identical output for different users, and does not warrant uniqueness.
• •Colony's remedy for a customer's breach of the Terms is suspension, termination, or indemnification - not clawing back ownership of Outputs already delivered.

What this research does is: confirm that this matches what every major AI Company does, and a clear-eyed explanation of a limitation that applies industry-wide, not just to Colony, that is worth Colony understanding and, in one respect, worth adding a short disclosure about.

What the Major AI Companies Actually Do

Checked directly against each company's current, published terms (not summaries) as of late August 2026:

The pattern is unanimous: every major consumer and commercial AI provider assigns or disclaims ownership in the customer's favor, and none of them warranty that a given output is unique. Colony's Terms already match this pattern exactly, including the non-uniqueness disclaimer. No competitor is doing something more generous or more protective that Colony is missing.

The One Limitation Every Company in This List Shares - Including Colony

“Ownership” in a contract and “copyright protection” under the law are two different things, and this is where a real, industry-wide limitation sits that we should be aware of before this goes back out as a firm position.

The Legal Backdrop:

U.S. copyright law has always required a human author. The U.S. Copyright Office's Part 2 report on AI and copyright (January 2025) confirmed that content generated entirely by an AI system, without meaningful human creative control over the expressive result, is not eligible for copyright protection, no matter who “owns” it by contract. This was tested in court: in Thaler v. Perlmutter, the D.C. Circuit affirmed in March 2025 that AI cannot be a legal “author,” and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up the case in 2026, leaving that rule firmly in place.

The Copyright Office has also been specific about prompts: even long, detailed, heavily iterated prompts generally do not, by themselves, count as the kind of human creative control the law requires. There is no fixed percentage or word-count threshold, the Office and the courts look at how much a person actually shaped the final expressive result, not how much effort went into prompting for it. Where a person takes an AI draft and does real, substantial creative work on top of it, editing, restructuring, combining it with original material, hand-modifying it - that additional human contribution can be copyrighted, even though the underlying AI-generated material on its own could not be.

Why this doesn't undermine Colony's position (it is universal):

Every Company in the comparison table above operates under the exact same legal backdrop. “You own the output” from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or Meta carries the identical limitation: contractual ownership does not create copyright protection where the law says none exists. This is not a gap in Colony's drafting, and it is not fixable by writing different contract language, it is a limit set by copyright law itself, sitting underneath every AI Company’s ownership promise equally.

Why it matters specifically for Colony's agency customers

Colony's own customer base is disproportionately exposed to this issue, because agencies frequently want to tell their own clients “this is exclusively yours, no one else can use it.” Contractual ownership supports that commercially. But if an agency's deliverable is substantially unedited AI output, the agency may not actually be able to stop a third party from independently copying that same material, because there may be no underlying copyright to enforce - regardless of what Colony's Terms say about who “owns” it.

Recommendation: One Small, Low-Cost Addition

No change to the ownership assignment itself. The one addition worth making is a short, plain disclosure, in the AI Transparency & Acceptable AI Use Policy, alongside the existing non-uniqueness disclaimer noting that ownership of an Output does not guarantee that the Output is protected by copyright, and that copyright protection generally depends on the extent of a customer's own human creative contribution on top of the AI-generated material. This:

• •Costs nothing to implement, it is a disclosure, not a legal restructuring.
• •Matches what several of the companies in the comparison table already signal in their own developer/help documentation, even if not always in the core contract.
• •Protects Colony from a customer later claiming they were misled into thinking “you own it” meant “it's automatically copyrighted and no one else can use anything like it.”
• •Directly serves Colony's own agency customers, who are the ones most likely to actually rely on copyright enforceability downstream and most likely to be caught off guard by this if no one tells them.

The Bottom Line

Colony's current position on AI output ownership is already right, already matches every major competitor, and needs no substantive change. The research surfaced one universal limitation, not a Colony-specific weakness, worth a short, low-cost disclosure addition so Colony's agency customers aren't surprised by something that would surprise them equally at any competitor. Recommend approving the position as-is, with that one disclosure sentence added to the AI Policy.