UK lawmakers back licensing‑first approach, adding pressure to global AI copyright standards

What licensing-first requires

A licensing-first regime cannot function without transparency, the committee said. The report called for a statutory obligation requiring AI developers to disclose what data their models were trained on, backed by open technical standards for rights reservation, data provenance, and labelling of AI-generated content.

“Without those foundations,” the report said, “rights holders have no reliable way to establish whether their work has been used.”

Karthi P, senior analyst at Everest Group, said standards such as C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) are being adopted by device manufacturers, generative AI providers, and platform players to attach content credentials and enable traceability, a kind of provenance infrastructure that a licensing-first regime would require. “The challenge is scaling this across decades of legacy content and a highly fragmented creator economy,” he said. “That infrastructure exists in pockets, but it is not yet industrialised end to end.”

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AndyC

Andy Curtis is an award-winning security consultant, researcher and public speaker. He has been working in the computer security industry since the early 1990s, having been employed by state and federal government, leading healthcare and banking providers across three continents. He has given talks about computer security for some of the world’s largest companies, worked with law enforcement agencies on investigations into hacking groups, and is a regular voice on TV and radio explaining IT security threats.

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