New tool to help creatives with copyright

Posted: Monday Mar 25, 2024

Staggering stats on how little NZ creatives know about their rights when it comes to their mahi has prompted a new online service to demystify the process.

Copyright Licensing NZ (CLNZ) - the not-for-profit organisation that helps authors, publishers and artists get their due when copyrighted work is copied and shared - has just announced a new online service to help New Zealand’s creatives protect their rights.

CLNZ surveyed a number of creatives in Aotearoa and found that only 12% of them felt confident that they knew their rights when it came to copyright.

Copyright is one of the most powerful protections that a creator has - but failing to keep on top of the relevant documentation or failing to understand all the implications of copyright can have serious financial consequences for creatives.

To address this knowledge gap, CLNZ has developed MyCreativeRights to make copyright information and protection available to anyone in Aotearoa.

“The original concept,” details Sam Irvine, CLNZ Chief Executive, “came from the research we did with The Research Agency on the Creative Rights Management Opportunity in 2022.

"This was an in-depth piece of work with a group of creatives that identified rights management is confusing, stressful and not always valued by creatives.”

The new service also coincides with rising uncertainty in the creative sector due to the unprecedentedly swift rise of generative AI tools and other technologies that exploit the data scraping of copyrighted work.

This isn’t just an issue of legality, but it directly affects the artistic integrity of creators.

“The relevance,” says Irvine, “is in creating a platform that creatives can join that gives them access to affordable legal advice if their work has been illegally taken for use in a generative AI dataset, and also to ensure they have agreements in place to ensure that can use the legal argument of copyright infringement in a case against that generative AI organisation.”

MyCreativeRights is a cloud-based service that brings together two products to help creatives prove the provenance of their work and maximise its value, bringing security and peace of mind in a rapidly evolving legal landscape that is often difficult to understand.

Good recordkeeping is vital in the event of a copyright breach. A creative may struggle to prove their rights if they cannot prove they have those rights to the work in the first place and what those specific rights are.

Continue reading... New Tool To Help Creatives With Copyright | The Big Idea