Is there a role for collective licensing and Collective Management Organizations (CMOs) in the licensing of AI, both for training (engaging the reproduction right) and use (distribution, publication, communication to the public and performance), and if so, what is that role? As the battle over AI’s use of copyrighted content for training and delivery of results continues globally, taking on different manifestations in different countries (some legal, some legislative, some consultative), rightsholders have argued that voluntary licensing is the best way forward. I argued just that point in a recent blog posting (AI Training and Copyright: It’s a Global Problem—and There is a Global Solution).
Voluntary licensing avoids the necessity for lawsuits, fair use or fair dealing determinations, and legislative amendments to change copyright law with all the unintended consequences that may entail. It also has the advantage of being multi-jurisdictional (assuming a broad licence is available), avoiding issues arising from different national iterations of copyright law, and provides both the tech and creative communities with a stake in AI development. It gives rightsholders control over the content they own or have created and, normally, a revenue stream. In some cases, such as licensing of prominent audio-visual repertoire, ongoing news content, or iconic images, that revenue flow could be substantial. In others, such as the licensing of an individual literary or musical work, the revenue might be minimal, but the issue of authorization would still be addressed. However, there is a fundamental issue associated with licensing the content of individual creators. In a practical sense, how do you do it? How do you reach all those individual or small rightsholders? This is where collective licensing could have a role to play. But it’s complicated (see here and here) and comes with problems as well as solutions.
Some AI developers, such as Anthropic in Australia, have proposed various options, such as an extended compulsory licence as the way to deal with the myriad of small rightsholders. The AI industry would pay into a central fund that would be used to compensate rightsholders who would be represented by a sectoral CMO, whether or not they were actually members of that organization. While a compulsory licensing scheme is one way to provide some revenue to small rightsholders, it removes one of the fundamental rights inherent in copyright, the author’s right to control the use of their work. Dealing with this problem requires rightsholders to opt-out, which is both technically difficult to implement and imposes a reverse-onus on rightsholders.
A fundamental principle of copyright law is that rightsholders have the right to authorize use of their work and should not have to exercise an opt-out proviso to prevent unauthorized use. Earlier this month a broad coalition of international news publishers wrote to Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese urging Australia to reject the kind of scheme that Anthropic is proposing, pointing out that such measures would be in violation of several international treaty commitments, would destroy the voluntary AI licensing markets that are rapidly developing and would establish Australia “as a location to launder infringement worldwide”.
In Canada, the umbrella cultural group Coalition for the Diversity of Cultural Expression (CDCE) has put forward three pillars governing the use of copyrighted content in the AI industry, which it calls the “ART principles” 1) authorization 2) remuneration and 3) transparency. Transparency is key because to date almost no-one outside the AI companies themselves knows exactly what the companies have ingested (reproduced) as part of their training, although it is far to assume “just about everything”. For many ingested works, the AI crawlers have absorbed the content on a “one and done” basis, that is they have used the content as cannon fodder as they scooped up vast quantities of data to train their bots. In other instances, involving use and re-use of the content, or what is called “Retrieval Augmented Generation”, the bot goes back to the original unauthorized reproduction of the work to extract information to provide answers to queries from users.
I tested this out with my own book “In Defence of Copyright“. I asked Google’s Gemini (I don’t subscribe to other AI services) a number of relatively obscure questions about the book. It had no difficulty whatsoever in providing quite detailed answers, and then asking me if I wanted more information, providing several suggestions as to what I could ask. To be able to respond in this manner, it was clear to me that the full work (not just the samples available through Amazon) must have been copied and ingested. No one asked my permission, I did not know the work had been copied, nor was I remunerated. None of the ART principles was followed. This story is repeated for probably just about every work under copyright ever published.
As I am a member of Access Copyright, the CMO for literary works in Canada, I wondered if it could help. Unlike its US and UK counterparts, Access Copyright does not offer a licence for AI training but is exploring the issuance of end-user licencing that would cover AI use. In the UK, the counterpart to Access, the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) announced the launch of an AI training licence last year, while the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) in the US now offers an AI Systems Training Licence. Australia’s Copyright Agency does not have a licence for AI training but has extended its annual business licence to encompass AI uses. For example, this enables business licensees to allow staff to include third-party content in prompts in AI tools used in the workplace. The CLA and CCC also offer similar licences for use of AI by businesses.
Access Copyright told me it has chosen to focus on end-user licensing (rather than focusing on the AI companies themselves) because that is where it sees potential: business users feed copyright-protected content, owned by varied rightsholders, into AI platforms every day. These uses are dispersed and decentralized, unmonitored and unknown. A collective licence helps to alleviate the risks associated with these uses, by authorizing the use and remunerating the creators. In any case, since AI companies have already ingested most works available digitally (and are now embarked on copying and then pulping historical works available only in hard copy), it is questionable if there is really much of a market left for licensing literary works for AI training. That train may have already left the station. I am not planning on “In Defence of Copyright” generating any AI revenues for my retirement.
There is, however, another role for CMOs beyond offering licences for use of member’s works, and that is to enforce members’ rights. SOCAN, the Canadian music collective which, according to its website represents “over 200,000 songwriter, composer, and music publisher members” has just launched a lawsuit against music streaming service SUNO alleging that the company’s generative AI platform is “producing and streaming outputs that replicate human-created musical works without consent or payment, and as a result has infringed the performing rights in musical works in SOCAN’s repertoire”. In other words, the suit is focused on outputs, rather than inputs, as discussed here. It wants SUNO (and presumably other streaming services) to license content in its repertoire (plus pay damages of $10 million for the 150 infringed works). It also wants an injunction from the court requiring SUNO to take down the infringing works. The suit is similar to one that SOCAN’s German counterpart recently won against SUNO and is based on infringement of the performance right. Music is of course different from a published work, which may be read only once by a consumer while music tracks are consumed over and over again. There are also differences in the rights embedded in the works.
How and what impact collective licensing will have on the further development of AI, and the livelihood of creators, is still being explored. Rightsholders need to retain control. However, coming back to my initial question as to whether there is a role for collective licensing and for Collective Management Organizations (CMOs) in the licensing of AI, I submit that the answer is “Yes”. Figuring out exactly how to do it is the tough part.
© Hugh Stephens, 2026. All rights reserved.