Update on AI licensing from PLS CEO, Tom West
An update for publishers regarding PLS' current generative AI collective licensing initiatives.
Six months ago we launched a publisher opt-in campaign for our generative AI licensing initiative at the London Book Fair. Since then, I have been delighted by the positive reaction we have received from publishers along with other industry, wider creative industry, and policy stakeholders.
As head into the Autumn, I wanted to update you on where we are with our AI licensing work overall and the options available to you as publishers registered with PLS.
AI has now been a regular subject in the news and in conversations across publishing for some time. Amidst a lot of noise and complexity, PLS' focus remains clear: to help publishers license the use of their content in practical and efficient ways, to identity and support new revenue opportunities, and to reinforce the principle that permission is needed when content is used.
We are doing this through three core licensing initiatives with our partners at the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA):
- One is for the use of content in generative AI products and services where published content is being used to build or improve their models.
- Another is licensing what we see as the most immediate practical use case: the use of published content in AI-enabled workplaces, either through generative AI model prompts or via access to high quality, subject-specific information in secure content repositories.
- And finally, we are seeking to address the use of content at the top of the AI value chain – from scraping to monitoring and aggregation.
If you have already opted in to any of the options mentioned here – thank you. Your participation is helping to establish a practical rightsholder-led framework for licensing the use of content in generative AI. If you have yet to opt in, we would be very pleased to talk through these options with you and answer any questions you may have.
I hope the information set out below provides a useful overview of the full range of collective licensing opportunities we are putting together. This update is part of our ongoing commitment to be transparent, to consult, and to give you clear choices about how your content is licensed. We continue to work closely with publishers, trade associations, and other partners to develop licensing opportunities that work for our industry.
- Tom West, Chief Executive, Publishers' Licensing Services
If you're a PLS-mandating publisher considering licensing your content for generative AI, here are the collective licensing initiatives that we currently offer:
Generative AI Product Licensing: AI products and services
This is the licensing available for the use of content in a range of generative AI products and services, including foundation models and enterprise AI systems.
Over 350 publishers have now opted in across these options, and our licensing partners at the CLA are using those rights to explore licensing opportunities in the market as the repertoire builds.
Whilst we opt in publishers to this scheme, we are not yet at the stage where publishers should expect significant short-term revenues. However, publisher support and participation are key as we build the offer and demonstrate that licensing across a large number of rightsholders is both possible and required.
Generative AI Workplace Licensing: business and public sector
Workplace AI licensing is already up and running for CLA business and public sector licensees. This scheme covers controlled use of participating publishers' content by licensed organisations in approved AI models – the most obvious example being the use of extracts of a published work, such as an article, in the 'prompt box' of AI tools to create a summary or high-level overview of that work.
The licence places guardrails on content that limits its use to internal purposes, and it is designed to bring existing workplace uses of content into a licensed framework, with revenue flowing back to publishers. As such, it is very much a natural extension of the kind of content use we have successfully licensed for more than four decades.
More than 800 publishers are already participating in this scheme, with payments going out since March.
The next step is to offer licensees the ability to use AI not only with short extracts entered into approved tools, but also to help them search, summarise, and retrieve information from content held within their own secure internal systems.
Education and Higher Education Workplace AI
We recently consulted publishers on whether PLS should support the CLA exploring similar Workplace AI permissions in the Education and Higher Education sectors, ahead of any discussion of potential licence changes within the sectors concerned.
The consultation considered two possible levels of permission:
- Standard Workplace AI: this option allows limited extracts to be used with approved AI tools for teaching, learning, research and administration.
- Premium Workplace AI: this option covers more structured uses of content in generative AI models, such as searchable collections and retrieval-based tools.
Publisher feedback to the consultation showed broad support for exploring these permissions, subject to there being meaningful guardrails, fair renumeration, and clear publisher choice.
Use of generative AI in media monitoring, web aggregation, and text and data mining
Alongside the strands mentioned above, we are also working with the CLA on related licensing where generative AI tools are changing how content is used by other parts of the market. This included media monitoring and aggregation uses, where AI may support indexing, summarisation, and delivery of content, as well as text and data mining licensing.
For any queries, please email publisher-relations@pls.org.uk.
