Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
Karsten Wenzlaff is a Crowdfunding and Fintech Expert from Germany. He is Secretary-General of Digit[...]
UK Authors Might Earn Royalties from AI Training
AI Licensing | April 24, 2025
Image: Freepik
New UK Licensing Consortium to Offer License to Access Copyrighted Content
As reported by the Guardian, the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA), a collaboration between the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) and Publishers' Licensing Services, is currently developing a licensing model to launch in Q3 2025 to ensure authors get paid when their books, articles, and other creative assets are used to train generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models. The CLA's goal is to provide a legal framework that will allow AI developers to access copyrighted content while ensuring that authors and publishers receive fair compensation.
Key Insights
- This is a proactive, industry-led initiative that is responding to growing concerns from UK writers over unlicensed data. According to ALCS, 81% of its members support a collective licensing model
- Some individual authors have filed lawsuits against tech companies like Meta and OpenAI already, like Lord Price (ex-Waitrose boss and author) who has accused Meta of illegally using his and other British authors' books to train its AI systems without permission
- The collective licensing agreement would be an alternative to the controversial UK governments proposal to allow AI companies to train AI systems on copyrighted work by giving them an exemption for 'text and data mining', while offering writers and creatives the option to opt out via a 'rights reservation' system.
See: 1,000 Artists Protest AI Copyright Plans with Silent Album
- The CLA argues that a collective licence would be both scalable and enforceable, helping AI developers meet legal requirements without having to negotiate with thousands of individual rights holders
- Some giant AI firms like Meta and Google have pushed back against large scale licensing proposals, claiming they'd too expensive given the volume of data their models require
Why It Matters
For fintechs, digital content platforms, writers creatives, and key stakeholders, this move signals a step towards regulated, rights-based access to data. A test case for how governments and publishers globally may seek to regulate AI development with existing copyright frameworks. As AI adoption grows so will the hunger for data and the need to resolve the conflict between innovation and copyright law.
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