Since the dawn of digital media, music and video content has been sold or illegally shared on a huge scale. In the film industry, authors and creators of content have no simple way to prove their ownership of intellectual property and to protect themselves against unauthorised copying and abuse.  Now, however, content owners face a whole new threat.  Generative AI tools consume huge amounts of content to feed their machine-learning models and presently it seems that very little thought is given to the rights of original creators and artists.

Given the scale of the challenge, the only viable solution is automation.  There must be a means for data-consuming systems to programmatically check the licensing status of the content they wish to use via an API and then both electronically contract for and pay for the content they consume.  Codel has designed a solution for this space that would ensure that consumers of content would gain a critical new data discovery tool and that rights owners would be fairly compensated for their work.