French Rights Body Sacem Announces Automatic AI Opt-Out For Members’ Work

deadline.com:

France’s Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers of Music has announced it is exercising its right to opt-out from making its members’ work freely available for use in the development of artificial intelligence tools.

The Paris-based body, which was created in 1851, represents 210,800 members – divided between 203,090 creators and 7,710 publishers – across all artistic sectors and manages a global repertoire of 166 million works, according to its own figures.

The announcement on Thursday comes amid growing debate in Europe over the implications of AI technology for professionals in the creative industries, as well as around how generative AI tools are trained using original works. “From now on, data mining of works in Sacem‘s repertoire by entities developing artificial intelligence tools will require prior authorisation from Sacem, in order to ensure fair remuneration for the authors, composers and music publishers it represents,” the body said in a statement posted on its website on Thursday. “AI tools can take many different forms, but most of them are based on training sets made up of various types of data, including protected works.

The use of these tools raises a number of questions in terms of respect for copyright, particularly when training sets that include protected works are created from data mining,” it continued.