Common copyright pitfalls for biotech start-ups (and how to avoid them in the age of AI)

June 30, 2026 By Becky Owen

Biotech and health tech start-ups run on published research. Scientific discovery, regulatory submissions, investor decks, partner updates, almost every workflow touches third-party content. And with generative AI now woven into daily research routines, the way teams copy, share and reuse that content is changing faster than most internal copyright policies can keep up.

The result? A growing set of everyday habits that quietly create copyright infringement risk. Here are the most common pitfalls biotech start-ups should watch for.

1. Pasting content to prompt generative AI tools

This is where copy and reuse behaviours are evolving most quickly. Around 72% of UK pharmaceutical and healthcare professionals now use generative AI at work, bringing these practices into daily workflows.

From asking AI to “turn this paper into a slide deck for an internal meeting”, to prompting it to “summarise this journal article for our research team” or “extract the key findings from this clinical study”, everyday AI use often begins with pasting or uploading published content into a tool such as ChatGPT, Claude or internal AI tools.

That paste is a copy, and if internal policies or guidance have not been updated to reflect how third-party content is used in AI prompts, this can leave gaps in copyright governance.

2. Assuming access equals permission

Journal subscriptions and database licences let you read content. They rarely give you the right to copy, store or share it. Confusing access with permission is one of the most frequent sources of unintentional infringement.

3. Assuming “free to read” means “free to reuse”

Just because an article is freely available online doesn’t mean it can be freely copied, shared or repurposed. Reuse is still governed by licence terms, which vary significantly, from attribution requirements to restrictions on commercial use and modification. Free to read is not the same as free to reuse.

4. Reusing figures and extracts internally

Everyday tasks carry hidden copying:

Pulling figures from journal articles into slide decks
Circulating published clinical study summaries ahead of submission review meetings
Quoting extracts from published studies in internal reports
Reproducing published data or figures in collaborative research reports shared across teams
Circulating literature summaries by email across teams

Even when materials never leave the company, each reuse can still be an act of copying that needs permission.

5. Sharing content with external partners

Emerging life science organisations rarely work alone. CROs, CDMOs, scientific advisors, investors and academic collaborators are part of daily operations. Forwarding a PDF or attaching an article to an email can each count as a separate act of copying and often requires its own permission.

6. Storing on shared drives

Saving articles to a shared drive, Slack channel or internal intranet may seem harmless, but how content is stored and who can access it matters. In fast-moving biotech teams, this kind of storage is often unstructured and scaled across multiple teams, making it difficult to track what is being shared and with whom. Many subscription licences explicitly restrict redistribution, even inside the same organisation.

7. Using published content in regulatory submissions

Regulatory filings frequently reference third-party research. Reusing figures, tables or extended extracts in submissions to regulatory bodies may require additional permissions beyond the original journal licence – something easy to overlook under submission deadlines.

Copyright compliance checklist for Biotech start-ups

Complete our copyright risk assessment for biotech organisations

Why this matters for biotech start-ups

None of these activities are unusual. They are how modern biotech, healthtech and life science teams operate. The challenge is that they can happen informally, across distributed teams, without consistent guidance on what is and isn’t permitted.

For early stage biotechs, the stakes are particularly high. Copyright issues surfaced during due diligence could potentially delay funding rounds, complicate partnerships and damage relationships with publishers your team depends on.

Building a clear framework around how published content is accessed, stored, shared and fed into AI tools is no longer a nice-to-have. It is core operational hygiene and a meaningful signal of governance maturity to investors and partners.

CLA Licensing

For many biotech start-ups, the most practical solution is a CLA licence. As organisations look to bring structure and governance to how published content is reused, our Pharmaceutical Licences provide blanket permission to copy, share and reuse content from millions of journals, books and publications, covering the everyday activities outlined above. The benefits are clear:

Broad coverage under one licence, instead of chasing per-article permissions
Internal and some external sharing with CROs, CDMOs, advisors and collaborators
Prompting generative AI is addressed in updated licence terms, closing a gap most organisations have not
Audit-ready compliance that holds up under due diligence and investor scrutiny

A CLA licence is an enabler, not a constraint. It gives biotech teams, along with the partners and collaborators, the freedom to work with published content at the pace modern science demands.