Why AI and copyright compliance can’t wait: Insights from Legal Geek

CLA sponsored the Legal Geek Conference 2025 and the event proved why it’s the leading gathering point for innovation and technology in the law sector. The atmosphere was energising, collaborative, and packed with forward-thinking legal and tech professionals actively shaping how AI and digital content will define tomorrow’s legal landscape. Over two days, we connected with hundreds of attendees who shared our commitment to responsible innovation.

AI was the conversation

Our Workplace Generative AI permissions drew more interest than anything else. People weren’t just curious, they were actively seeking answers. The questions weren’t theoretical. They were practical, urgent, and rooted in what’s happening right now in their organisations. AI came up in nearly every conversation. Not as a future concern, but as a present reality that needs addressing today.

One theme kept surfacing: compliance. But while many conversations focused on governance, particularly around privacy and data. This missing link became clearer to us, people are thinking about compliance and want to do the right thing. And yet, copyright can so easily be forgotten.

And yet, more attendees came to us already knowing they needed to think about copyright. They weren’t looking for convincing, they were looking for clarity on how to move forward legally and responsibly.

The conversations revealed something important: legal professionals understand the stakes. They know their organisations are using AI tools daily, they know published content is being fed into prompts, and they know this creates compliance exposure they can’t ignore.

Some specific questions kept surfacing. What’s the difference between a CLA licence and an internal AI policy? How do other countries handle collective licensing?

But more often, the conversations were about the fundamentals. Why does a licence matter? What does compliant AI use actually look like? How do we protect our organisation while still innovating?

From historical precedent to modern solutions

Our Head of Growth and Renewals, Ossie Ikeogu, delivered a talk that connected three centuries of copyright history to today’s AI challenges. From the Statute of Anne in 1710 to player pianos in the 1900s, photocopiers in the 1970s, and file-sharing in the 2000s, every technological shift has followed the same pattern. It starts with fear, followed by licensing solutions that protected creators while enabling innovation and compensation for their work.

Generative AI is no different. The scale is unprecedented, with potentially millions of copyright protected content being used to train models, often without clear permission or remuneration frameworks in place for rightsholder and creators. But the principle remains: innovation thrives when creators are protected and access is enabled through smart licensing.

Ossie asked the audience a few simple question, First: “Raise your hand if your organisation uses AI tools regularly.” Most hands went up. Then: “Keep your hand up if you’re confident you’re doing so legally.” Far fewer stayed raised. That moment captured exactly what we heard throughout the event. People know there’s a gap between their AI usage and their compliance and they’re looking for practical ways to close it.

CLA’s answer: Licensing that enables innovation

This is what CLA has done for over 40 years. We facilitate the lawful reuse of content, ensuring peace of mind and enabling organisations to focus on innovation.

Our Workplace Generative AI Permissions address the immediate need. As an addition to our Business and Law Licences, these updated permissions enable the use of published content in prompts for generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Claude (subject to the terms and conditions of the licence).

Our upcoming Generative AI Training Licensing solution goes further. Developed in partnership with ALCS and PLS (representing authors and publishers respectively), this upcoming licence will cover the use of opted-in published works for the training of generative AI products and services, fine-tuning or further training of generative AI tools on a specific set of content, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Whether you’re building your own LLM or fine-tuning an internal AI system, this licence will support innovation while ensuring rightsholders are fairly compensated, It’s proactive licensing for organisations that want to lead, not follow.

Why this matters now

The energy at Legal Geek was genuinely inspiring. We found ourselves in conversation after conversation with professionals who weren’t resistant to compliance, they were actively seeking it. They understand that responsible AI use isn’t just about avoiding legal risk, it’s about building sustainable innovation that respects the creative work underpinning these technologies.

Copyright has a 315-year track record of adapting to technological change. The question isn’t whether AI will reshape copyright, it’s whether your organisation will lead that transformation or follow it.

Further resources from CLA 

• • CLA Law Licence
  • The GAI Revolution Whitepapers
  • CLA’s Copyright and Generative AI Toolkit
  • CLA’s workplace generative AI permissions
  • CLA’s Copyright in the Workplace course