Unlocking the Secret: How Blanket Licensing Could Revolutionize Generative AI—and What It Means for You
Three of the four panels at this year’s conference related to AI; and of those, two panels addressed classes of technological solutions to AI-related copyright issues. The first of these reflects parallels that the current AI era has with the development of interactive streaming two decades ago: the potential need for online services to take licenses to “all” content of a given type, and thus the need for mechanisms to enable such licensing on a massive scale. Solutions to this problem for streaming developed exclusively in the market until a statutorily mandated solution – for music, in the form of the Music Modernization Act – appeared in 2018. Analogously, the panel “My Blanket and Me: Blanket Licensing for Generative AI” discussed various companies’ efforts to build blanket licensing platforms for AI uses in advance of any substantive results from courts or Congress.
