The IPTC, in association with the PLUS Coalition, has submitted a response to the National Science Foundation’s reequest for Information on the Development of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Plan.

The full response can be downloaded here: 

IPTC_PLUS_ A Proposal for Communicating Data Mining Rights from Copyright Holders to Artificial Intelligence Developers – for US National Science Foundation

Our response can be summarised as follows: 

1. On behalf of our memberships, IPTC and PLUS respectfully suggest that existing copyright law is sufficient to enable licensing of content to AI platforms. A “fair use” provision does not cover commercial AI training. Existing United States copyright law should be enforced.
2. IPTC and PLUS Photo Metadata provide a technical means for expressing the creator’s intent as to whether their creations may be used in generative AI training data sets. This takes the form of metadata embedded in image and video files. This solution, in combination with other solutions such as the Text and Data Mining Reservation Protocol, could take the place of a formal licence agreement between parties, making an opt-in approach technically feasible and scalable.
3. It is true that our technical solutions would also be relevant if the US government chose to implement an opt-out based approach. However, this does not currently protect owners’ rights well due to the routine activity of “metadata stripping” – removing important rights and accessibility metadata that is embedded in media files, in the misguided belief that it will improve site performance. Metadata stripping is performed by many publishers and publishing systems – often inadvertently.
4. As a result, we can only recommend that the US adopts an opt-in approach. We request that the US government ensures that metadata embedded in media files be declared as a core part of any technical mechanism to declare content owner’s desire for content to be included or excluded from training data sets.

Content creators are a core part of the US economy and have a strong voice. We agree with their position, but we don’t simply come with another voice of complaint: we bring a viable, ready-made technical solution that can be used today to implement true opt-in data mining permissions and reservations.