CLA Board approves the inclusion of workplace AI permissions to corporate and public sector licences.

CLA has now received approval from its Board and Members to add new permissions to its business and public sector licences. These extended permissions recognise the growing use of generative AI tools in the workplace and will permit professionals to use published content as prompts on paid-for enterprise versions of generative AI platforms such as CoPilot, ChatGPT and Gemini. Rights relating to the training of large language models are not included and are being consulted on separately.

CLA will now be working with Publishers’ Licensing Services (PLS) to seek opt-ins from publishers.

Why are we adding these permissions?

It has been estimated that 7 million people in the UK have now used generative AI at work1. The inclusion of these new permissions is the latest step in CLA’s commitment to keeping its licences and services relevant in a fast-changing environment while ensuring fair returns for copyright owners.

For over forty years, CLA’s licences have adapted to enable the copyright-compliant use of content with new technologies, and generative AI is no different. These new permissions will cover professionals looking to copy or use published content as a prompt or input as part of their work. For example, if an employee copies and pastes an article or report into a generative AI tool to generate insights and trends to help make a strategic decision.

Mat Pfleger, CLA’s CEO, said:

Collective Licensing can offer a comprehensive solution for employees who make use of generative AI tools in the workplace. Our aim is to enable the reuse of protected content legally, while safeguarding rightsholder and creator rights.

Key features of these new permissions:

• Make copies for prompting generative AI tools
• Use outputs for internal purposes
• Use outputs for limited external purposes

These new licence permissions will be available to all UK businesses and public sector organisations in early 2025, with sector launch dates to be announced soon. CLA will also be introducing Premium licences in 2025 covering systematic prompting and RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) using licensed content.

To stay up to date with the development of CLA licensing solutions covering the usage of published content and generative AI, sign up here: cla.co.uk/ai-and-copyright.

https://www.deloitte.com/uk/en/issues/generative-ai/trust-in-generative-ai-uk.html