CISAC Director General delivers the Sir Hugh Laddie Lecture on AI and the collective management of rights
CISAC Director General has delivered the 2024 Sir Hugh Laddie Lecture University College, London on the intersection between Artificial Intelligence and collective management of rights. The whole lecture has now been made available and can be seen here.
Oron reviews the different AI tools and explains how creative industries react to this new technology, and what the main challenges faced by Collective Management Organisations in licensing AI platforms are. The legal regulation around AI is evolving, and different jurisdictions adopt different approaches to key issues such as transparency and disclosure obligations, exceptions for Text and Data Mining and opt-outs by rightsholders, making it even more difficult to navigate this landscape.
Oron describes the actions taken by CISAC’s authors’ societies so far, and the questions around the legal status of works created by AI and the ability to collectively manage them.
He also gives his own views about where the industry is going and how rights management entities can adjust to the new market reality. While changes are no doubt on the horizon, the benefits of licensing AI collectively and the economies of scale inherent in the collective management system, make it the best place to address AI.
Authors’ societies will naturally need to adjust, but they have done so successfully in the past with the inventions of broadcasting, recording, home taping and most recently, digitisation and interactive online use. AI is huge and will transform our lives, but it's not different from previous technological revolutions that challenged existing remuneration models.
Our key goal has always been - and will remain - ensuring that human creators can make a living from their art and continue contributing to our culture. This will be achieved by a combination of effective legal rights, transparency obligations for AI, accountability and respect for creators' rights and interests.