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RIGHTSANDAI – An Open Resource to Boost Fight Against Illegal Scraping of World’s Music

April 5 2024

RIGHTSANDAI / Thur. 4 April 2024: Creativity and tech are natural fits, working interchangeably to mutual benefit. Today, this
combination in the music industry helps license more than 160 million original music tracks, available at the touch
of button, to a global audience of billions.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not new in our sector. The music industry has been adopting AI for many years: as
creative tool, to deliver tailored digital music to fans, to administrate licenses or to enforce rights – even against
unlicensed AI. What is new, is the recent wave of AI companies, ranging from huge to small, who refuse to observe
laws and illegally ‘scrape’ the world’s music, train Large Language Models (LLMs) and feed Generative AI output.
There is not a music company or music maker anywhere unharmed by such practices. These business models
systemically infringe music copyrights at source, solely to accelerate tech developments and commercial growth.

In response, the music sector has taken cases against infringing AI companies, has secured meaningful new
enforcement tools against such illegal activity in the EU’s incoming AI legislation and elsewhere and is taking all
steps to defend human creativity and the creators’ rights.

A next new phase is www.rightsandai.com. This newly available, open, online resource serves several purposes:
• Music companies and collective management entities can reaffirm and reserve their rights against
the unlicensed ingestion of copyright works including by scraping.
• Other stakeholders can endorse and support the call for legal and fair AI markets.
• AI companies, online content crawlers and bots will have access to a convenient, centralised, nonexclusive resource of rights reservations.

Since the launch of rightsandai.com, the initiative has received widespread support from music companies
including Sony Music Publishing, Universal Music Publishing Group, peermusic, Concord Music Publishing, Warner
Chappell Music, Reservoir Media, Kobalt Music and many others.

The site will be available in seven languages – English, Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Arabic and Japanese.
It functions on a legal level (the declaration of Reservations against scraping) and a technical level (A .CSV file is
available for upload of company information in machine readable form). Combined, these deliver an operational
international AI guardrail of “no use without consent, credit & compensation.”

 

See full press release here with quotes from ICMP Board directors and senior industry execs