Royalty-free (RF) material subject to copyright or other intellectual property rights may be used without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use, per each copy or volume sold or some time period of use or sales.
In photography and the illustration industry, it refers to a copyright license where the user has the right to use the picture without many restrictions to the licensor.
Royalties are a percentage of earnings that are paid to an intellectual property owner/ content creator.
Most jurisdictions, including Spain[3] and Germany,[4] state[5] that only works created by a human can be protected by copyright.
Since generative AI models derive their source material from a countless amount of human-generated content, it is not easy to define who owns what percentage of the rights to the results.