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Every result Lightdrift returns carries a rights object. The goal is simple: your agent should never have to guess what it’s allowed to do with an image.

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Hosted images

Lightdrift hosts Creative Commons-licensed images on its own servers. Results include hosted file URLs alongside the original source, license, and attribution information. Hosting a file does not change its license or remove its conditions.

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Rights information

Lightdrift reports rights as declared by the source. We collect the license and permission information a source publishes alongside each image and normalize it into one machine-readable shape. Hosting an image does not mean it is cleared for every use. Read its license conditions and consider any rights beyond copyright. That means:
  • Copyright — the license shown is what the source declared. For well-governed sources (CC0, Creative Commons, US-government public domain) declarations are reliable in practice, but they remain declarations.
  • Beyond copyright — a copyright license never covers everything. People in a photo have likeness rights; logos have trademark rights; some buildings and artworks have their own restrictions. Clearing those is on you and your users.
The basis field records how rights information was obtained. Read it together with the license and permission flags.

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The fields

Noncommercial licenses (cc-by-nc, cc-by-nc-sa, cc-by-nc-nd) are in the corpus and come back with commercial: false. Set filters.commercial: true to select images whose reported licenses permit commercial use. Check the other license conditions and any rights beyond copyright before use.

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A practical reading order for agents

  1. Check license against what the task needs (commercial, derivatives).
  2. If attribution_required is true, carry attribution through to the final output.
  3. Treat null permission flags as “the source didn’t say,” not as “no.”
  4. If the subject is a person, logo, or artwork, remember those rights are separate from the copyright license.