ALCS CEO Barbara Hayes on AI licensing
An update for publishers regarding ALCS' author opt-in campaign.
PLS has partnered with the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) and Authors Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) to develop an industry-led collective licence scheme that provides a way for publishers to license their content for use in generative AI products and services through a simple opt-in agreement (see FAQ for full details). ALCS Chief Executive, Barbara Hayes, has provided the below update for publishers regarding their author opt-in campaign.
Generative AI has created an urgent challenge for both authors and publishers: how can the use of copyright works by AI systems take place with permission, transparency, and fair payment to rightsholders?
At ALCS, our priority is ensuring that authors are fairly rewarded when their work is used. As an organisation with 130,000 members, it is vital that we act in accordance with their views. Our 2024 survey on AI and licensing, still the largest consultation of writers on this subject with more than 13,000 replies, clearly demonstrated that our members want to be paid for such uses and would support efforts to obtain a licence.
The CLA Generative AI Solution delivers on that. However, in that survey, a minority of our members expressed that they would not want to license their works for AI training. Therefore, it is important that we recognise and respect the diversity of views within our membership. That is why we have developed a Preference Centre within the ALCS website; this allows eligible members to decide, either on a work-by-work basis or by the entirety of their repertoire, which works, if any, are included.
Recently, we have been contacting our members whose publishers have signed up to be included in the licence, inviting them to log in and set their preferences within the Preference Centre, and the response so far has been encouraging – with a number of authors contacting us to find out how they can encourage other publishers to sign up as well. Next month, our members will be paid money collected from AI Workplace permissions, which were added to CLA Business licences last year, for the first time. This is an important milestone as it represents the first collectively licensed money paid to UK authors for AI uses.
These two initiatives demonstrate that collective licensing remains an effective tool for ensuring rightsholders are fairly compensated as new technologies and uses emerge. We’re delighted to work with PLS and the CLA to establish a healthy licensing market in which the use of copyright works takes place legally with permission, choice, and fair payment at its heart.
- Barbara Hayes, CEO, Authors' Licensing & Collecting Society
If you have signed up with PLS to license your content for GenAI training, fine-tuning, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), PLS encourages publishers to engage with their authors on this licensing opportunity. Some sample wording for authors has been provided below to explain how the scheme works and to encourage your authors to opt in via ALCS if they choose:
We are participating in the CLA Generative AI Solution, a voluntary collective licensing scheme for the use of text in generative AI, which has been developed by the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA), Publishers’ Licensing Services (PLS), and the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS). This licence enables both authors and publishers to receive payment when works are used to train AI models.
If you wish to participate and benefit, you will need to opt your works in via ALCS. If you are not yet a member of ALCS, you can sign up here. ALCS members with eligible works will be contacted by email and invited to log in and set their preferences in their Preference Centre. You can access a tutorial which guides you through that process here.
If you would like to find out more about the licence, ALCS has published further information and FAQs here.
If you would like your titles to remain opted out, no action is required.
Publishers that have not opted in yet will need to sign an opt-in form to confirm their participation in AI licensing.
https://sign.signable.app/widget/yxjCjn9FWb
If you have questions about AI Licensing, or to book a meeting with the PLS team to discuss further, please email publisher-relations@pls.org.uk.
