The BackPage Weekly | Commercial guide to AI in 2025: Licensing deals, policies and protection
By Jack Jones and Anna Poulter-Jones
The AI landscape keeps changing, whether in terms of the technology, the politics or the laws around it (or, more commonly, all at the same time).
This understandably results in confusion and uncertainty, particularly across the creative industries which are both rich in original content and also well poised to use this technology to their advantage.
This also results in opportunities. New avenues to monetise creative content are emerging, and those able to cut through the uncertainty are starting to reap the benefits.
Strike a deal: We are currently seeing and advising on a surge in licensing deals across media sectors between rightsholders and AI developers including social media, publishing, production, image libraries, and news/media.
However, without doubt, the most in demand sector is sports rights and archive footage.
The reason for this is largely due to (i) various ongoing, often high profile, court cases related to copyright and AI, combined with (ii) changes in regulation across different jurisdictions and shifting political stances, resulting in yet further uncertainty for both developers and rightsholders.
It is perhaps unsurprising that uncertainty around the use of content for AI training results in an increase in licensing activity. Against a contentious and shifting backdrop, developers want certainty that the tools they are creating are based on a secure foundation of validly licensed content.
Meanwhile, more and more rightsholders are clocking onto the business opportunity that this presents. And the more content you own, the more valuable the deal.
As a rightsholder this means that you can set the terms on which your data and content are used, and monetise this use as an additional revenue stream. As a developer, you have quick access to unique, validly licensed data and can position yourself as a frontrunner of ethical and legally sound AI development.
Protective tools: Whether you want to license your content on your own terms, or simply protect new works from being scraped without your consent, there are various tools that you can deploy, including:
Putting in place an express reservation of rights in your website terms and conditions restricting any use of copyright works for any AI training purposes.
Software solutions such as Robots.txt allow for the automatic, machine-readable reservation of rights, albeit with some limitations. Key among those limitations is the fact that this applies at the domain and URL level, rather than individual content or files. You would also need to specify the reservation of rights for each web crawler.
There are also software providers who are now offering reservation of rights to individual copyright works, rather than to domains/URLs such as C2PA, fingerprinting and watermarking that can also embed provenance metadata directly to individual content which describe origin and authorship.
AI best practice: Lastly, if you are using AI tools for any internal or external-facing content, you should have a policy in place to govern your company's use of this technology.
Not only is this sensible in ensuring that your use of AI tools remains ethical and legally sound, but also having an AI use policy is increasingly expected by third parties such as investors and insurance firms.
They will expect to see that you are aware of the potential risks regarding the use of AI tools, particularly third party tools, and have adopted a responsible approach to mitigating those risks, for example by having internal processes in place to track how and when AI tools are used, and how compliance with the changing laws in this area is monitored.
Jack and Anna are lawyers in Sheridans’ Interactive and Creative Media team, and advise on AI-related matters across the creative industries for clients ranging from influencers and talent to agencies and platforms, as well as games studios and AI developers. If you have any questions or would like to discuss further, then please feel free to get in touch with us at anna.poulter-jones@sheridans.co.uk and jack.jones@sheridans.co.uk.