RIGHTSANDAI.com – An Open Resource to Boost Fight Against Illegal Scraping of World’s Music

Creativity and tech are natural fits, working interchangeably to mutual benefit. Today, this combination in the music industry helps license more than 160 million original music tracks, available at the touch of button, to a global audience of billions.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not new in our sector. The music industry has been adopting AI for many years: as creative tool, to deliver tailored digital music to fans, to administrate licenses or to enforce rights – even against unlicensed AI. What is new, is the recent wave of AI companies, ranging from huge to small, who refuse to observe laws and illegally ‘scrape’ the world’s music, train Large Language Models (LLMs) and feed Generative AI output. There is not a music company or music maker anywhere unharmed by such practices. These business models systemically infringe music copyrights at source, solely to accelerate tech developments and commercial growth.

In response, the music sector has taken cases against infringing AI companies, has secured meaningful new enforcement tools against such illegal activity in the EU’s incoming AI legislation and elsewhere and is taking all steps to defend human creativity and the creators’ rights.

A next new phase is www.rightsandai.com. This newly available, open, online resource serves several purposes:

• Music companies and collective management entities can reaffirm and reserve their rights against the unlicensed ingestion of copyright works including by scraping.

• Other stakeholders can endorse and support the call for legal and fair AI markets.

• AI companies, online content crawlers and bots will have access to a convenient, centralised, non-exclusive resource of rights reservations.

Since the launch of rightsandai.com, the initiative has received widespread support from music companies including Sony Music Publishing, Universal Music Publishing Group, peermusic, Concord Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music, Reservoir Media, Kobalt Music and many others.

The site will be available in seven languages - English, Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Arabic and Japanese.

It functions on a legal level (the declaration of Reservations against scraping) and a technical level (A .CSV file is available for upload of company information in machine readable form). Combined, these deliver an operational international AI guardrail of “no use without consent, credit & compensation.”