AI boosts efficiency and increases innovation, but legal risks pose a challenge
Feeding copyrighted third-party content into an AI is copying, which requires a licence from the author or copyright holder. Without a proper licence, this may constitute copyright infringement.
AI applications end up using copyrighted content without permission in situations such as when content is fed into AI applications as part of a prompt or when a browser-integrated AI is asked to summarise or translate the text on a page. Using AI without understanding the legal risks involved is potentially a major challenge for businesses.
Last spring, the British copyright organisation CLA published a study that examined the use of AI in private and public organisations in the UK. The study found that 61% of professionals used AI for work purposes. The respondents also believed that the use of AI will increase over time.
Technology that increases the efficiency of work is developing rapidly, and organisations want to adopt it quickly. For example, 83% of employees using AI found that it improved their efficiency, creativity and innovation at work.
At the same time, however, the ground rules may be unclear and there may be poor understanding of the risks involved. In the study conducted by CLA, only 21% of AI users understood the copyright terms related to AI tools, and 78% had used third-party material in their prompts.
Third-party material is also fed into AI in Finland
In August, we studied how Finnish businesses and other communities use third-party content in their AI prompts. A total of 1,004 employees from different sectors responded to the survey. The data was collected through the panel of ISS-Otantatutkimus.
According to our study, almost half of all respondents (48%) feed third-party content into AI tools through prompts, and 29% do so at least a few times a month.
A significant proportion of the third-party content fed into AI tools is copyrighted, with examples of such content including photographs and illustrations (21%), newspaper and magazine articles (15%), scientific articles (12%) and parts of works of fiction and non-fiction (8%).
Third-party content was used in prompts for purposes such as searching for information, coming up with ideas for presentations, writing a summary, or translating a text into another language. Third-party content was also used in AI prompts to create presentations or other materials or images.
A Kopiosto licence makes responsible use of AI easier
Until now, it has been challenging for organisations to use AI in compliance with the Copyright Act because they have had to seek permission from authors and publishers separately for each use case. To make things easier, we are expanding our copying licences for businesses and public administration organisations to also cover the use of third-party material in AI application prompts, subject to certain conditions. This allows us to provide our customers with a legally certain licensing solution for also complying with the Copyright Act in the use of AI.
The expanded copying licence will become available to businesses and public administration organisations at the beginning of next year. Due to the expansion, we will increase the price of the licence in all sectors over the next two years. The AI expansion will be automatically included in existing copying licences for businesses and public administration organisations, without requiring any action from customers.
Under the expanded copying licence, employees of organisations will be allowed to use written works, images, and other publications or excerpts thereof in AI applications that are intended for internal use within the organisation and that do not use the content fed into the applications to train the applications, language models, or similar AI models or programs. Organisations will be allowed to use the output of such applications for internal use within the organisation, such as to provide information or training to the staff or for other administrative use.
We will also offer our customers a separate licence that will supplement the copying licence, allowing organisations to further train or fine-tune their internal AI software with copyrighted written material and images.
Our licensing solutions are designed in collaboration with our member organisations representing the creative sector. Organisations get legally certain licences that will allow them to use AI tools within their organisation in a legal, copyright-compliant way. At the same time, authors and other copyright holders will receive the remuneration owed to them for the use of their works.