As a Teosto member, you have agreed in the membership agreement to submit work notifications for your works and to report all relevant information concerning them to Teosto.
These instructions will give guidance to the authors how the use of AI in creating music affects the registration of works. These instructions do not cover licences for the use of AI-generated music.
For a work to be eligible for registration, it must be the result of human creativity
Copyright protects works that are original and independently created by a human author. Teosto has signed the Core Principles for Artificial Intelligence Applications (in Finnish), which emphasise that copyright protects and rewards human artistry, not content created and produced by machines.
Copyright law protects the results of human creativity. This means that compositions or lyrics that are 100% AI-generated cannot be protected as new works, and registering an AI-generated work as a protected work in Teosto’s works register is not allowed.
AI may be used as a tool in creating music
However, the disclaimers above do not mean that you cannot use AI in your work; AI can support human creativity, make the creative process more efficient, and give an increasing number of people the opportunity to realise their artistic visions.
At Teosto, we understand the opportunities that technological development brings, and we encourage authors to try different methods and tools. At the same time, we emphasise the importance of using AI tools responsibly.
Works created with the assistance of AI can be registered in the work register if, and only if:
- artificial intelligence has been used as a technical tool in the creative process; or
- the author has created protected music and only one part of the work (composition or lyrics) is fully AI-generated.
However, we want to encourage authors to use their own valuable human input in all their creative work with music. As stated in the Core Principles for Artificial Intelligence Applications, AI can never replace human artistry: only humans are capable of communicating the endless intricacies, nuances and complications of the human condition through art.
Authors registering their musical works are responsible for ensuring that the work is eligible for registration.
When submitting work registrations, you are responsible for ensuring that the use of AI or the resulting work does not infringe the rights of third parties.
Under the terms of service of Teosto’s online service, you assert that the information you provide is correct. You are, among other things, responsible for ensuring that the authors you indicate in the filing are the actual people who have created the work in question. You are also responsible for ensuring that the work you register is eligible for registration.
This means that when you use AI in the creative process, you will need to assess whether you have contributed enough human creativity to the work. Teosto has the right to reject work registrations that infringe our instructions or distribution rules.
Lawfulness and responsibility of AI applications and services
When you use AI services, you typically agree to the service’s terms of use. Some AI services reserve rights in their terms of use to the output generated by the AI service. Some of the services state in their terms of use that the rights to the output belong to the user, but the output may also involve third party rights.
It may therefore be possible that even if you had worked on and edited the output generated by an AI service yourself, because of the service terms of the AI application you used, you do not have the rights to the output. In this case, you cannot register the work in Teosto’s work register. For this reason, it is important to always carefully read and understand the terms of use for the AI application you are using. It is also worth noting that the AI services may change their terms of use from time to time, so you should regularly check them for any updates. Unfortunately, Teosto cannot give guidance on the content of the terms of use for individual AI services.
It is also worth remembering that copyrighted works have been used as input for the purposes of developing algorithms in many AI services without the permission of the copyright holders. However, AI services do not, at least yet, generally provide information about material or works that have been used in the development and training of AI. When using AI services, you cannot currently be sure whether the service infringes on your or other people’s copyrights.
INSTRUCTIONS: How to register a work for which AI was used as a technical tool in the creative process
If you use AI applications or services for inspiration as part of your creative process, but do not use the AI-generated output as is – in other words, you make free and creative choices that affect the end result – Teosto’s view is that the end result is the outcome of your creative work and AI has only been used as a technical tool in the creative process. In this case, you can generally register such work as usual in accordance with Teosto’s membership agreement and other rules.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to give an exact answer as to what is the extent of one’s own creative input that the author needs to provide, and for example, edit or modify the AI-generated output, for the work to be the result of the author’s own creative work and, thus, a work that can be registered. This must be assessed by the author themselves.
Copyright protection requires creativity from the author. This means that, in some situations, a small but significant change may lead to the threshold of originality being exceeded. However, it is very likely that this will require more than just a few notes or words to be changed.
If AI has only been used as a tool in the creative process, the work can be registered fully in the name of the human author(s) in the work notification. The AI is not credited in the registration.
INSTRUCTIONS: How to register a work in which one component (the composition or lyrics) are 100% AI-generated
Only the result of human creativity can by law be protected by copyright. If you have created the composition of a new work yourself (or together with other authors), but the lyrics of the work are 100% generated by AI, the work can be partially registered.
The AI-generated component, i.e. the lyrics in this case, cannot be registered as a protected work. However, the composition will be eligible for registration if the conditions of Teosto’s membership agreement and distribution rules are otherwise met.
Similarly, if you have created the lyrics yourself and the associated composition is fully AI-generated, the lyrics can be registered as a copyright protected work, but not the composition.
How do I separate the protected component and the AI-generated component when registering a work?
In the work notification, the copyright-protected component and the AI-generated component are recorded by following the same principles as if the AI-generated component (composition or lyrics) was a public domain component included in the work.
For technical reasons, the fully AI-generated component is recorded in the work notification under IPI number 1244889810 (“Teosto AI”). This IPI number was created to enable adding AI-generated components onto the work notifications.
If the Teosto AI IPI number is added to the registration notification, you will not be able to record any shares in the work on the notification by yourself. Instead, in these cases, the shares will be recorded by Teosto after you submit the notification.
The shares allocated for AI-generated components, i.e. the composition or lyrics in the work register can only be fully AI-generated (100%) or not at all AI-generated (0%). No other shares for AI-generated components can be entered into the works register.
From a distribution perspective, the AI-generated component works similarly as a public domain share, for which copyright protection has expired. In other words, no distribution shares will be paid for AI-generated components of the work. The distribution share payable to the copyrighted component is determined in accordance with the principles of Chapter 11 of Teosto’s distribution rules dealing with works that include public domain shares.
Arranging, translating and publishing music that has an AI-generated composition or lyrics
Since components of a copyright protected work that are fully AI-generated cannot be protected as new works, AI-generated components cannot be arranged, translated or published. Neither are the rules on publishing shares, translation or arrangement applied to the AI-generated shares. This also means that an arranger, translator, or publisher will not be able to receive distribution shares for the AI-generated component.
We reserve the right to clarify or revise our position
At Teosto, we keep track of international developments in the registration of and other practices related to AI-augmented music. It is therefore possible that we will revise our position in the future if developments in industry practices or other reasons require us to do so. However, the purpose of issuing this guidance is that we want to make it possible already at this stage for authors to register AI-augmented music in Teosto’s work register.