The first all-day conference organised by PLS (Publishers’ Licensing Services) with an agenda to provide useful information on a wide range of industry topics, including rights and licensing, sustainability, the impact of artificial intelligence, and the latest legislative and industry developments.
The morning featured workshop sessions on the basics of collective licensing, rights management, and permissions, while licensing partners, the Copyright Licensing Agency and NLA Media Access, provided updates on education, business, government, and international licensing.
The Keynote speech way given by Dominic Young, previously a newspaper executive at Newscorp, with a wide experience of copyright which was sometimes contentious, particularly when dealing with rights negotiations on behalf of the media in general.
We could not escape AI, and Dominic delivered, raising the key question as to whether legislators had learnt anything from the open field they gave to platforms in the past, which is coming back to haunt them. Are they at risk of doing the same with the AI industry today. He echoed the whole creative community’s response in urging solidarity, and a solid defence of copyright as the foundation of innovation and progress, not a barrier that AI developers have presented it to be whilst being more than willing to protect their own copyright.
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