The Manchester Principles

What this is

A shared statement of the minimum conditions any settlement between human culture and generative systems needs underneath it.

Four pillars — licensing, provenance, attribution, enforcement — across 29 numbered clauses. Deliberately technology-neutral: it describes obligations and outcomes, not products. Anyone may adopt it. There is no fee, no licence to negotiate and no certification scheme.

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What it is not

Not a technical standard. Several different standards should be capable of satisfying it.

Not an endorsement of any company or registry. A framework that only works if one provider owns the rails has failed before it starts.

Not a restatement of existing law. Several clauses ask more than the law currently requires, and that is deliberate.

Not an argument against generative technology. It is an argument that powerful technology should be built on consent and evidence.

Culture is being turned into raw material at industrial scale and returned to us with the names rubbed off.

Preamble, v1.0

The four pillars

One · Licensing

Permission must be given, not assumed

Silence is not consent. Opt-in as the default, machine-readable terms, routes proportionate to the rights holder.

Clauses 1.1–1.7

Two · Provenance

Origin recorded at creation, not reconstructed after

The load-bearing pillar. Auditable disclosure of training corpora, open and vendor-neutral mechanisms, declaration before detection.

Clauses 2.1–2.6

Three · Attribution

Credit is data, not courtesy

Persistent identifiers carried onwards, credit that survives distribution, contribution recognised as well as authorship.

Clauses 3.1–3.5

Four · Enforcement

A right without a remedy is decoration

Independent verification, redress a solo creator can actually use, rules that cannot be escaped by moving a server.

Clauses 4.1–4.6

Plus five cross-cutting commitments (5.1–5.5) on voice and likeness, proportionality, openness, evidence and interoperability.

How this document changes

Not a manifesto to sign. A text under amendment, in public, by the people it affects.

01

Someone proposes wording

A member proposes replacement text against a numbered clause in the discussion.
02

It has to persuade unlike minds

Twenty supporters across at least three role categories. Both conditions — so it cannot carry on one constituency alone.
03

It earns the floor

Meeting the rule wins a place at the summit. On its own it changes nothing.
04

The decision is published

Carried, adopted into the version history, rejected with a published reason, or deferred. Everything else is published as recorded dissent.

Comment on a clause · Open discussions

The summit

All Content AI Summit
9 October 2026

Beyond The Music, MediaCity, Salford. The summit is asked to settle the constitutional questions v1.0 deliberately leaves open: who holds the authoritative text, how amendments are agreed, how often the Principles are reviewed against what has actually been built, and how translations relate back.

No commercial party with a material interest in implementing the Principles — including the author's own company — should hold custody of them.

Adopting them

Adoption commits you to three things:

Implementing the Principles in your own operations.
Publishing within twelve months how you intend to do so — and where you fall short.
Asking the same minimum conditions of relevant commercial counterparties.

Free. May be partial — honest partial adoption is more useful than unexamined full adoption. Attaches to a stated version. No certification, accreditation or endorsement exists.

Request a place in the working group →

A floor, not a ceiling

Every place is checked by a person, and the register is capped at the first cohort of 1,000. Reading, citing and commenting need no account.

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