The label says Apache. One file out of four says no.

ThinkSound, the video-to-audio model from Alibaba's audio lab, is listed on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0 — the licence developers treat as a green light: use it, ship it, sell what you build with it. The repository even contains the full Apache text. Anyone who stops reading there will get it wrong twice over. The first correction is at the bottom of that same file, and repeated in the project README: the code, models and dataset are for research and education only, and commercial use is not permitted. A restriction of that kind sits oddly inside a document whose whole point is to remove restrictions, but it is the authors' stated intent, and it is stated twice. The second correction is more interesting, because it would survive even if the authors changed their minds. The release is four files: a 21.06 GB generator, a 5.73 GB lightweight version of it, a 950 MB synchronisation module — and a 2.52 GB audio autoencoder. That last one is not Alibaba's work. It is a fine-tuned copy of Stable Audio Open, released by Stability AI under the Stability AI Community License, which explicitly forbids redistribution under a different licence and reserves commercial use above a revenue threshold. The notice in the repository says so plainly. What makes this more than a footnote is what the file does. The autoencoder is the part that turns the model's internal representation into an actual waveform. Without it the other three files produce nothing you can listen to. So the most restrictive licence in the package is attached to the component that cannot be removed — and it governs the working system, not an optional extra. The pattern is not unique to this release. PrismAudio, the successor from the same team and the same repository, carries an MIT label and a model card restricting the weights to research and education. In both cases the machine-readable field says one thing and the human-readable text says the opposite, and it is the field, not the text, that search filters and automated compliance checks read. For a studio wondering whether it can use these models on paid work, the answer is no in both cases. For everyone else, the useful habit is smaller and more general: on a model page, the licence tag is a claim, not a document. Open the file it points to and read to the end — and check whose weights are in the box alongside.