AI and copyright

A disagreement can stop the whole song being licensed. A song with several writers has several owners, and a society or publisher will normally only put a work forward for AI if everyone with a share says yes. One writer with even a small percentage can refuse and block the lot, whatever the others want. It is more tangled than it is for recordings, which usually have a single owner who can decide alone. So talk to the people you write with about where you each stand on AI early, while it is still hypothetical, rather than scrambling to agree when a licensing offer is sitting in front of you.

In principle, yes. Your songwriter contract covers the use of your work whatever the format, so an AI licence counts as another way your music earns, and your publisher and society should pay it through to you like any other royalty. But the rates and terms are new and still being negotiated, so nobody can tell you yet how much it will come to. And a deal announced between an AI company and a label does not by itself put money in your account: there is already a US dispute over whether settlement money owed to creators was passed on, and in a lot of cases the AI money has not started to flow at all. Ask your publisher how AI income is worked out, how it is split, and when you would actually see it.

Possibly, and you may not be able to find out. Part of the problem is that you often cannot tell whether your work has been used, which is what makes it so hard to do anything about. Several AI music tools were built by copying large catalogues of recordings without licences, and song lyrics have shown up in the training data of ordinary AI chatbots. Some disclosure rules are arriving - the EU now makes large AI providers publish a summary of what they trained on - but they are new and full of gaps. The first place to ask is your publisher or collecting society, though the answer they can give you may be incomplete.

There is no straight yes or no, and it depends where you are. In the UK, you hold the exclusive right to copy your own work, and there is no exception that lets an AI company train on it without asking; the government looked at creating one in 2024 and 2025, then dropped the idea. So training on your songs without a licence probably infringes your copyright, even though no UK court has ruled on it directly. In the US, AI companies claim "fair use", a defence that allows some copying without permission. Two early cases accepted that argument, but only narrowly, and both were about books rather than music. One of the judges said he ruled that way only because the writers had argued their case poorly, and warned that many future claims would not be fair use. The US Copyright Office has gone further, saying music is less likely than text to qualify. The idea that this is settled in the AI companies' favour does not stand up.