Equity has joined with 20 other organisations, as part of the Creators’ Rights Alliance (CRA), to warn Big Tech companies to stop the unlawful use of creators’ content.
The CRA sent a letter yesterday to Big Tech companies including Microsoft, Google, OPENAI, Apple, and Meta.
The letter states that writers, performers and artists are among those whose works have been used unlawfully to inform the training of AI models by technology companies, without consent or remuneration of creators.
We are asking Big Tech companies not to authorise the use of any of their works protected by copyright and/or related rights (including performers rights) for the training, development, or operation of AI models, including large language models, or other any other AI products, unless they have specifically agreed licensing arrangements with creators and rightsholders.
The CRA coalition is made up of groups representing 500,000 individual members working as professional creators in the UK, including sister unions the Musicians’ Union, National Union of Journalists and the Writers' Guild of Great Britain.
The CRA is calling on developers of all, but especially generative, AI systems:
- To provide full transparency about the works which have been used to develop their model;
- To make detailed requests for any works they seek to use in future;
- To obtain authorisation (in advance) from the relevant creator and rightsholder, and where a rightsholder is licensing a catalogue of works to seek assurances that the creators of those works have specifically consented to the licensing arrangement
- To offer appropriate remuneration for all uses - past and future;
- To give appropriate attribution to all creators concerned with the work, in all cases;
- To engage in good faith licensing negotiations to redress past bad practice, to remove from their systems any copyright protected works (including but not limited to literature, images, music, and performances) which has been used without authorisation (datasets and programs) and to show evidence of such removal;
- To respect the fact that there may be occasions where creators and/or their representatives may, on ethical and/or economic grounds, choose to withhold their consent for the use of their work.
The full letter can be downloaded below.
