USA – NEW YORK Trends and Developments Contributed by: Nancy E Wolff, Scott J Sholder and Elizabeth Safran, Cowan DeBaets Abrahams & Sheppard LLP
Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard LLP 60 Broad Street
30th Floor New York NY 10004 USA
Tel: +1 212 974 7474 Email: info@cdas.com Web: www.cdas.com
AI’s effect upon existing licensing practices in creative industries What role can licensing assume in ensuring clean and authorised datasets for use in training AI models? The answer requires understanding the key function that licensing already plays within creative industries. For the visual images industry, for example, licensing is crucial to disseminating a wide range of visual and audio-visual content, including photography, illustra - tions, audio-visual works, 3D models and their asso - ciated digital files and metadata to the media and commercial content creation companies. Licensing ensures that millions of still and video images includ - ing their data – often gathered by image aggregator platforms into easily searchable, readily download - able digital collections – can reach licensees within the downstream industries that require this content. Industries such as editorial news, advertising, mar - keting, entertainment and media, all rely on images to both relay news and contribute to creative content that reflects our culture and world. Image aggregator platforms either own the visual content or have image partners and contributors whose contractual arrange - ments permit the licensing and distribution of their content for a share of the revenue, incentivising visual creators to continue to create new works. Licensing is the underpinning of the visual images industry and accounts for billions of dollars’ worth of transactions. However, the advent of generative AI platforms, and particularly text-to-image AI models such as DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion risk disruption to this industry. Not only does unauthorised and uncompen - sated online scraping of content-for-data bypass a
Copyright Licensing in the AI Era Legal developments surrounding AI continue to move rapidly as we embark upon 2026, commanding front row attention from across diverse industries and practices, including within intellectual property. As AI continues to develop at breakneck speed, trans - forming industries and how they do business, so do surrounding legal frameworks and recommended industry standards and best practices. Of particular note are developments in licensing practices for gen - erative AI models, as industries from music to film to photography work to keep pace with the demand for high-quality audiovisual and textual data. Although there is ongoing litigation nationwide tar - geting the unauthorised scraping of content from the internet for use as training data in AI models, industries including publishing, film, music and image licensing are already rising to meet the moment by congruously developing and implementing licensing practices for their creative content. The implementation of such practices to conscientiously convey better-quality, clean and compensable datasets signals a grow - ing trend of licensing frameworks facilitating AI. Far from putting the brakes on the emerging technology, licensing serves to augment and implement important oversight over data ingestion – actually fostering AI’s advancement – all within the bounds of copyright law that maintains incentives for human authorship and invention.
695 CHAMBERS.COM
Powered by FlippingBook