During the 2025 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, GoDigital Media Group Chairman and CEO Jason Peterson discusses with Forbes the music industry’s past learnings in terms of licensing and monetizing digital content--and his blueprint for creative content to evolve alongside artificial intelligence technologies.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00We're back with Forbes and Imagination Action here in the World Economic Forum, Davos.
00:06We have Jason Peterson, CEO of GoDigital, talking about something that's super important
00:11and we've been talking about it all day, which is how in a world where gender of AI is basically
00:17becoming an infinite producer of content, how we protect copyrights, because basically,
00:22and Will.i.am was on stage this morning, and that was a huge topic.
00:27You didn't seem to have any answers other than, basically, Will pointed out that every
00:32song all of a sudden is derived from something else.
00:36How do you have a treaty, do you have a white paper out, that offers, thank goodness, some
00:40solutions to this versus just pointing out the problems?
00:43Maybe we can go over some of those, but first, tell us more about GoDigital and then we can
00:47talk about your solutions to the issue.
00:49Sure.
00:50I'll give you a little bit of my background.
00:51I started my career as a producer.
00:54I'm an attorney by training.
00:55I've made a career out of being the business end of things to creative people.
00:58We founded GoDigital in 2005 when we forecasted this paradigm shift from physical goods to
01:05digital goods.
01:06We were the first to monetize YouTube.
01:08We were the first to build digital supply chain for media in the cloud.
01:12We've been innovating in the financial markets for music for many years.
01:15The current innovations that are needed are really financial and licensing and legal related
01:19to that.
01:20You're seeing what these catalogs are selling for.
01:23People have figured out that copyrights are gold, but they're only gold if there's a fence
01:29around them.
01:30As an attorney, as an entrepreneur, and as somebody who works with creatives, how do
01:34we go into this new era where some of the protections that you've built over the last
01:3910 years are in the pre-AI era?
01:43We like to take a stakeholder capitalism perspective on these things.
01:46We think that win-wins-
01:48We're in the right spot then here in Davos for that.
01:50Completely.
01:51Win-wins can be built for the entire ecosystem of AI companies, of creators, of end users.
01:57What it really comes down to is creating certainty.
02:00If you go look at the landscape of what's going on right now, there's tons of lawsuits.
02:04There's tons of ambiguity in the law and how people should be working together.
02:08We think there's an ecosystem approach.
02:10I'd like to propose a framework for that that I think is quite simple and very actionable
02:14that the industries could implement.
02:17Let's walk us through that.
02:19What it really comes down to are six things.
02:21First, we should think about AI in terms of inputs, that's training data, transforms,
02:26that's prompts, and the outputs of the generative AI.
02:29We should think about that in the context of control.
02:32We should think about it in the context of credit and in the context of compensation.
02:35The three Cs, control, credit, and compensation.
02:39We should probably attack those one at a time.
02:41Starting with control, I think it's really important to begin with that courts continue
02:47to affirm the value of intellectual property.
02:50The copyright is, in fact, a fundamental right.
02:54Secondly, I think it's really important that legislators, wherever the market's inefficient,
02:58pass laws that create clarity.
03:00Thirdly, I think the industry and regulators need to work together.
03:04Where that really comes in are things like in search, for example.
03:07We've had a thing called a robot.txt file for 30 years.
03:10We've all seen it, not knowing what it meant.
03:14It basically tells search engines how to crawl a website.
03:18We should do something called an AI.txt file, that when AI companies are scraping data,
03:21it tells them what they can and can't use, what the licensing terms are, who they need
03:24to contact, all of the relevant details.
03:26We should create a public database of provenance information, who owns what, as it goes through
03:31the supply chain from the human authorship, through training, through people creating
03:35new content using generative AI.
03:37One question, that sounds like a global need.
03:41It doesn't even sound like even if the US did it, would that be enough?
03:44That sounds like something we would need to enforce around the world.
03:47Ideally, we create standards as an industry that are adopted locally in every country.
03:53If you look at copyright, there are conventions that are 100, 150 countries are members of,
03:58so it's very doable.
03:59I think the third piece is an industry collaboration with regard to control and credit.
04:04We should build APIs between generative AI companies, platforms, and copyright offices,
04:10so the copyright office can evaluate when something qualifies for copyright and who
04:14those owners should be.
04:15Right, right, right.
04:16There's a lot of shoulds.
04:17How do we get from should to do?
04:20I think it has to do with collaboration between industry and regulators.
04:25I think in the third piece, which is compensation, probably the most interesting piece, there
04:29are very, very good precedents that we can rely on.
04:32In the music publishing industry, for 100 years, they've had a value-sharing arrangement
04:39where when a broadcaster, a radio station, a television station wants to use music, they
04:43pay a share of their revenue into a pool, and it's shared among creators.
04:46If you think about tech, they've also had a value-sharing arrangement.
04:50It's called stock options, right?
04:52They share value among the people that are creating that value.
04:54I think, from a compensation standpoint, that these two industries, copyright owners and
04:59tech industries, should get together in a value-sharing arrangement, probably under
05:03a statutory licensing scheme.
05:05I think that the regulators in each country need to say, hey, there's a million creators,
05:10there's a handful of licensing AI, general AI companies that need to license this content.
05:15Creators, they don't have the capacity to negotiate with AI companies, and AI companies
05:18don't have the capacity to manage a million people.
05:20It has to be done wholesale, it can't be done retail.
05:23We need to create a body, if you will.
05:26In the United States, five or six years ago, we created the Music Licensing Collective.
05:31There's a law called the Music Modernization Act that was passed, and it allows companies
05:35like Spotify, and YouTube, and Google, instead of paying two million publishers, to pay one
05:41licensing collective, who then pays all the publishers.
05:44We can do that with generative AI, and everybody can share in the value.
05:47How does Section 230 fit into all this?
05:50Well, Section 230, which is related to communications, I think, is actually less important.
05:56It creates safe harbors for internet service providers and people in the communications industry.
06:01I think that, first and foremost, we need to address these common frameworks, and then
06:07the CDA can maybe be amended, if needed.
06:10All right, so you're pointing out a bunch of stuff that makes perfect sense.
06:15Last question, two-part question.
06:18What are the odds that this gets done, and when does it get done?
06:21Well, I think right now, you've got to create certainty for these markets to really thrive.
06:25So if stakeholders start working together, I think it could be done in a couple of years.
06:28All right, we look forward to that.
06:29Thank you, Jason.
06:31Appreciate it.
06:32Appreciate your time.
06:33Thanks.