Publishers have been invited to opt in to a new, industry-led collective licensing scheme designed to enable AI companies to use published works in a way that is “both fair and lawful”.

The initiative has been developed by Publishers’ Licensing Services (PLS) – a not-for-profit collective management organisation that represents the interests of publishers in UK collective licensing and provides rights management services to the publishing industry – alongside the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) and the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society.

According to the PLS press release, the new ‘Generative AI Solution’ will sit alongside direct agreements between publishers and AI companies and provide “an additional route for publishers of all sizes to participate in and benefit from AI-related uses of their content”.

In practice, the scheme will operate in much the same way as existing collective licensing systems. Publishers who opt in to the scheme will allow their works to be licensed for use by AI developers on agreed terms. As set out in the press release, it is wholly voluntary, and publishers would control both what content they make available and for which purposes (for example, whether for (a) training AI models; (b) fine-tuning AI systems; or (c) retrieval-augmented generation (where AI tools draw on existing information to produce answers)).

Those who opt in to the scheme will then see their works appear in a ‘content repository’ that will enable AI companies to license them in exchange for a fee and under “clear and transparent usage guidelines”. Revenue will then be distributed back to publishers.

The scheme has been launched amid a growing recognition that the industry needs practical solutions to address uncertainty about how copyright-protected works are used to train AI systems (we discussed here, for example, a recent campaign launched by authors). At this stage, publishers are invited to opt in to the scheme, after which PLS, the CLA, and AI developers will work together to “implement the licensing framework and enable AI companies to license content through the system”.

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