A framework for licensing, provenance, attribution and enforcement in the age of synthetic content
This is the living copy. Every clause is numbered, addressable and open to comment, support or a proposed amendment. Nothing here is settled until the summit settles it.
Culture is being turned into raw material at industrial scale and returned to us with the names rubbed off.
The systems doing this are neither illegitimate nor inevitable. They are being built now, under rules that are still being written. The question is not whether generative systems will exist. It is on whose terms they will be allowed to draw on human work.
Whatever settlement you favour, it needs the same plumbing underneath it: a reliable way to know where a work came from, who made it, what permissions attach to it, what use was made of it, and what happens when those permissions are ignored. Without that, consent is theatre, licensing is guesswork, credit evaporates and enforcement belongs only to whoever can afford the lawyers.
At Rochdale in 1844, the Pioneers built a co-operative on the idea that people could organise the terms of trade for themselves. The lesson is not nostalgia. It is institutional design: when power becomes concentrated, durable rights require durable machinery.
A shared statement of the minimum conditions under which human creative work can be used to train, fine-tune, condition or generate synthetic content. Technology-neutral. A floor, not a ceiling.
A technical standard. An endorsement of any company, platform, registry or protocol. A restatement of existing law. An attempt to displace lawful exceptions. An argument against generative technology.
Licensing
Permission must be given, not assumed.
Use of protected work to train, fine-tune or condition a generative system requires permission granted in advance by the relevant rights holder. Silence is not consent. A regime that requires millions of creators to discover invisible uses and object one by one should not be mistaken for a consent regime.
Opt-in as the default. No training, fine-tuning or output conditioning on protected work for commercial purposes without permission obtained beforehand.
Machine-readable permissions. Terms expressed so they can be discovered, read and honoured automatically at scale, without being proprietary to one licensor, platform or model provider.
Routes proportionate to the rights holder. Collective licensing for those who need it, direct negotiation for those who want it, and a workable path for the unaffiliated individual with neither a lawyer nor a collecting society behind them.
Remuneration that can track use. Payment structures capable of reflecting the extent and character of a work’s contribution, rather than treating an entire catalogue as an undifferentiated bucket of training material.
Permissions that travel. A permission granted once should remain legible wherever the work goes, across platforms, formats and jurisdictions.
Lawful exceptions preserved. Nothing in this pillar overrides an exception or limitation properly available under applicable law. Equally, an exception intended for research, preservation, education or another protected purpose should not become a route to commercial-scale ingestion by another name.
Past use is in scope. Compliance going forward does not by itself settle what happened before. Adoption carries an obligation to disclose prior unlicensed use and to negotiate in good faith over it, without prejudice to any party’s position on its legal status.
Provenance
Origin must be recorded at the point of creation, not reconstructed after the fact.
Provenance is the load-bearing pillar. Licensing without provenance is difficult to enforce, attribution without provenance becomes guesswork, and enforcement without provenance turns into litigation about memory. Declaration at source is the better starting point.
Disclosure of training corpora. Meaningful, auditable disclosure sufficient for a rights holder to determine whether and how their work was used — retrospective as well as prospective.
Provenance captured at creation. Origin, authorship, contribution and rights information bound to the work when it is made, through tools people already use wherever possible.
Open and vendor-neutral mechanisms. Built on published specifications and open governance. No single company should own the rails on which an entire sector’s provenance depends.
Durability through transit. Provenance designed to survive ordinary distribution, format conversion, compression and platform ingestion, and to fail visibly rather than silently.
Declaration before detection. Synthetic origin asserted by the system responsible for producing it, with independent detection used as a check rather than the primary source of truth.
Proportionate privacy. Records should carry what is needed to establish origin, rights and contribution, and no more. Pseudonymous and collectively held credits must remain possible.
Attribution
Credit is data, not courtesy.
Attribution has spent two decades being treated as an editorial nicety that gets a little thinner at every handoff until it disappears. In a synthetic economy it is part of the mechanism by which contribution is recognised, licensed, paid and remembered.
Persistent identifiers throughout. Creators, contributors, works, recordings and rights holders identified through established persistent identifier schemes, populated as close to source as possible.
Attribution that survives distribution. Credit that persists through the supply chain instead of terminating at the first platform or intermediary that finds it inconvenient.
Machine-readable and human-readable. Legible to systems for licensing and payment, and legible to people for recognition and accountability.
Contribution as well as authorship. Recognition of the session players, engineers, writers, producers and editors whose work is inside the finished object and who currently disappear first.
Attribution at inference, not only at training. Where a specific work materially conditions a specific output, that relationship should be capable of being recorded and disclosed. A direction of travel: the techniques are immature, and adopters should publish honestly about what is not yet possible.
Enforcement
A right without a remedy is decoration.
The first three pillars describe obligations. This one describes what happens when they are ignored, which is why it will be the first thing some parties try to negotiate away. It must not be.
Auditability. Material disclosure obligations subject to independent verification rather than self-certification alone.
Remedy proportionate to the claimant. A route to redress a solo artist, photographer, writer or small producer can actually use. A right enforceable only by parties able to fund High Court litigation protects catalogues, not creators.
Cross-border recognition. Rules that cannot be escaped simply by moving a training run, server or corporate entity to another jurisdiction.
Consequences that bite. Sanctions material enough that compliance is cheaper than breach, including, where lawful and proportionate, restrictions on commercial deployment of systems built through persistent unlicensed use.
Remedy for past use. Where past use infringed applicable rights, there must be a practical route to redress. A framework that only looks forward rewards those who moved fastest before anyone was watching.
Transparency as the precondition. No enforcement mechanism works without the disclosure required under Pillar Two. Provenance and remedy must be designed together or both will fail.
Cross-cutting commitments
Each pillar depends on the others.
These commitments qualify every clause above. They are the difference between a framework that works for everyone affected and one that works only for those who already have counsel.
Voice, likeness and performance. Protection must extend beyond rights in works to the voice, image, performance and identity of a person. Style itself is not claimed as property; identifiable stylistic imitation is in scope only where protected by law or deployed so as to misrepresent identity, endorsement or performance.
Proportionality. Every obligation must work for a freelance musician, an independent journalist, a small publisher and a bedroom producer, not just a major rights holder with a compliance department.
Openness. Governance of any shared mechanism should be independent of any single commercial interest, including the interests of those who helped write them.
Evidence over assertion. Claims about what technology can and cannot do should be tested, published and revisited.
Interoperability with existing work. These Principles sit above and alongside existing standards, identifier schemes and rights frameworks, not bulldoze them.
Rochdale is invoked here as architecture, not atmosphere. Three ideas from the international co-operative tradition are particularly relevant, and each corresponds to a commitment in this text.
Open governance
Vendor neutrality
Interoperability
Any organisation, creator, institution or public body, in any territory, may adopt these Principles. No fee, no licence to negotiate, no certification scheme. Adoption may be partial — an adopter that cannot yet meet a clause should say so, say why and say when.
The Principles need a custodian, an amendment process and a review cycle. This version does not name them. Those are constitutional questions, and they belong to the people who agree with the Principles rather than to the person who drafted them. Four things are open — comment on each in the governance space.
Who holds the authoritative text and any public register of adopters?
How are amendments proposed, published for comment and agreed?
How often are the Principles reviewed against what has actually been built and enforced?
How are translations and derivative versions related back to the authoritative text?
Working definitions, deliberately broad, expected to be tested and tightened through discussion.
Any work, recording, performance, image, text, dataset or other subject matter in which copyright, related rights, database rights, performers’ rights or equivalent applicable rights subsist.
The person or entity entitled to authorise the relevant use, including authors, performers, producers, publishers, labels, assignees, licensees and CMOs acting under mandate.
Any computational system producing text, audio, image, video, code or other content whose behaviour derives in whole or part from patterns learned from existing material.
The initial derivation of model parameters from a corpus; subsequent adjustment of those parameters; and the use of material at or near the point of generation to shape a specific output.
Use of a specific work in a way that makes a discernible and non-trivial contribution to a specific output. The threshold is left to be developed through evidence and review.
Verifiable information about the origin, authorship, contribution, rights status and subsequent handling of a work or output, recorded at or near creation and preserved through distribution.
Content generated in whole or substantial part by a generative system, whether or not it is presented as such.
A durable, resolvable identifier for a person, work, recording, performance or organisation, issued under an established scheme and stable over time.
A person’s voice, likeness, image, name and performance, however protected in a given jurisdiction. It does not assert property in style as such.
An organisation or individual that has adopted all or part of a stated version of the Principles under the Adoption section.