THE MANCHESTER PRINCIPLES
How the creative industries and AI can work together, on fair terms.
Presented 9 October 2026 at the close of the Creative Industries AI Summit, MediaCity Salford, by the people in the room.

WHERE THESE CAME FROM
The Manchester Principles started from a simple worry: that human creative work was being scraped from the digital commons at industrial scale, and that authorship itself needed protecting in the age of AI. That argument was first set out in the white paper The Enclosure of the Human Mind.

Rose Marley of Co-operatives UK and Oli Wilson of Beyond The Music took the idea to the Mayor of Greater Manchester, and it grew into a co-operative framework in the tradition of the Rochdale Pioneers: not a rulebook, but a way for people who don't agree to make hard decisions together.

On 9 October 2026, Beyond The Music brought music, screen, games, publishing, advertising, design, live, collecting societies, labels, publishers, government and the AI sector into one room at MediaCity Salford. Over a full day of sessions, people who usually argue past each other listened to each other instead.

The Principles were distilled from what was said on the day. They were presented at the close by Rose Marley, Chair of Beyond The Music, and Cliff Fluet, Summit Chair. They belong to the room that made them.

PRINCIPLES FOR CO-OPERATION
How we work together. Some of these come from the co-operative movement. Most came from the room.
1. Working together. We start from what we share, and talk in good faith.
2. Fair value. If your work makes the money, you get a fair share, big or small.
3. Respect for creators and their works. Ask first, give credit, treat people and what they've made properly.
4. Investing in the next generation. Skills and chances for those coming through, here.
5. Open to all. Everybody's welcome. You don't need to agree on every detail to have a seat.
Not a rulebook. A way of behaving with each other.

PRINCIPLES TO FRAME THE DEBATE
What we work on. A frame holds the picture. It doesn't paint it.
* Protect. Your work, your voice, your face. Your call.
* Pay. If AI is built on creative work, it pays for it, bedroom producer or major.
* Progress. AI that widens what creative people can do, and a next generation with careers here.
* Sovereign Creativity. Our culture, grown on our own terms and shared on fair ones.

WHAT THE ROOM SAID
* Licensing already works. Hundreds of AI licensing deals have already been struck. The task now is to scale licensing so it reaches small rights holders too.
* Transparency is the lever. Record keeping and disclosure of training data are what bring bad actors to the table and make enforcement possible. You can't stop what you can't see.
* Provenance needs plumbing. Interoperable, open standards, and provenance information that can't be stripped out as work travels.
* Likeness needs its own right. Today's patchwork of laws doesn't fit digital replicas of a person's voice and face. The direction of travel is towards a clear right that covers everyone, not just the famous.
* Enforcement has to be cheap and fast. Notice and takedown on every platform, remedies with teeth, and routes that work for people without lawyers.
* Permission belongs to people. Consent should be granular and set by every contributor, including session musicians and producers, not only by labels and publishers.
* Sovereignty is the frame. Applying UK law to UK creative work is a question about the country's future, not a technical detail.

THE 80% WE ALREADY SHARE
* Human creativity comes first.
* Consent: ask before you use someone's work, voice or likeness.
* Fair pay for the work that AI is built on.
* Transparency about what has been used to train and make things.
* Enforcement that works for the smallest player, not just the biggest.
The other 20% is where the interesting work is.

THE QUESTIONS STILL OPEN
* Where the value goes. Much of the value UK creative work generates is captured by AI systems owned and monetised elsewhere. How does more of it stay with the people and places that made it?
* Who consents. Label and publisher deals are already happening at scale. How does consent also reach individual writers, performers, producers and session players?
* How licensing is priced and run. Collective routes, so a developer needs one counterparty and a creator doesn't have to bargain alone.
* Who holds the record. Where the register of rights and permissions sits, and on whose authority.
* What audit can actually see. What independent audit inspects once training data has already been through a model.
* Standards that hold. Technical standards for provenance are being built, but they only stick with legal backing, the way secure web connections became the norm for online payments. And they have to survive the infrastructure that carries creative work, from operating systems to the networks that deliver files.
* The next generation. Much of the archive may already have been scraped. The safeguards that matter most are the ones that protect the work being made from now on.
* Integrity of the work. Who protects a work when AI changes it, beyond paying for it.
* Pace. How fast government and industry should move, and in what order.

HOW THE DAY WAS CAPTURED
Every session at the summit was recorded and transcribed. AI tools helped with the transcription, and every line was then checked by a person against the recordings to remove errors before anything was used. The Principles, the threads and the open questions in this document come from that reviewed record.

HOW TO CITE
The Manchester Principles. Presented at the Creative Industries AI Summit, Beyond The Music, MediaCity Salford, 9 October 2026. https://themanchesterprinciples.org/
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.
Archived August 2026 working draft: https://themanchesterprinciples.org/archive/working-draft-2026-08/