AI Royalties -- an IP Framework to Compensate Artists & IP Holders for AI-Generated Content

TL;DR

This paper explores how AI-generated content impacts intellectual property rights and proposes a new framework for compensating artists and IP holders through AI royalties, utilizing a similarity metric to assess copyright infringement.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic method to evaluate AI-generated content for copyright infringement and proposes a novel IP framework for collecting royalties from licensed AIs.

Findings

A similarity metric (CLIP) can assess copyright infringement.

Existing compensation frameworks have significant financial implications.

A new IP framework based on licensed AIs is proposed.

Abstract

This article investigates how AI-generated content can disrupt central revenue streams of the creative industries, in particular the collection of dividends from intellectual property (IP) rights. It reviews the IP and copyright questions related to the input and output of generative AI systems. A systematic method is proposed to assess whether AI-generated outputs, especially images, infringe previous copyrights, using a similarity metric (CLIP) between images against historical copyright rulings. An examination (economic and technical feasibility) of previously proposed compensation frameworks reveals their financial implications for creatives and IP holders. Lastly, we propose a novel IP framework for compensation of artists and IP holders based on their published "licensed AIs" as a new medium and asset from which to collect AI royalties.