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Rights and licensing

Clean rights, documented provenance, fewer surprises: licenses written to match the use, and records that survive an audit.

Rights and licensing

We don't write licenses to cover everything, we write them to match the use

Clean rights, documented provenance and fewer surprises is the whole promise, and it is getting both more valuable and more complex. A license should be written to match the actual use: the channels, the territory, the term, and whether the work can be amplified as paid media. The common failure is a mismatch, where content is used beyond what was licensed, and the record needed to sort it out does not exist. We write licenses to the use and keep records that survive an audit.

How we work

The complexity now includes AI and likeness. Synthetic reproduction of a person's voice and image is cheap, and the law is catching up fast. Tennessee's ELVIS Act protects voice and likeness against unauthorized AI reproduction, and the proposed federal NO FAKES Act would establish transferable digital-replica rights lasting decades after death. We write AI and likeness clauses into agreements now, specifying whether reproduction is permitted, in what contexts, and for how long, because these are becoming the terms that matter most and the ones most likely to be litigated.

  • Grants are written in specifics, never in general language.
  • Every asset is linked to its consent and its source.
  • Expiry and renewal dates are tracked and flagged early.
  • New uses get a new license and a new fee.

Where this is going

Provenance is the technical backbone of clean rights. C2PA Content Credentials attach a tamper-evident record of origin and editing to a piece of content, and Adobe's Creative Cloud, along with a growing set of cameras and AI tools, now supports them. We treat provenance as part of licensing, so that a piece of work carries its own history: who made it, what was done to it, and what it is licensed for. A license backed by provenance is one that holds up when it is questioned.

How we help

Licenses that fit

Scope, territory, duration and format are written to what the work is actually for. Extensions are priced and dated, not buried.

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Provenance

Every asset carries a record of who made it, under what terms and with what consents, so it can be traced when a question arrives.

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Fewer surprises

Before an asset is reused, the record says whether it can be. That check is quicker than the argument it prevents.

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