You're Giving Away Your Content for Free (And You Don't Know It)

Sean Weisbrot: Who really owns your content once it's online, you or the platform, the rules of licensing, copywriting and digital rights are changing fast, and creators are getting stuck in the middle from hidden social media clauses to AI scraping lawsuits. Today's digital world is a legal minefield if you're not actively managing your rights. You're the one that's probably getting screwed. I sat down with Stuart Cohen, CEO, and managing director of Super Stock, a large media licensing platform to unpack what creators and brands need to know right now. This is your crash course in protecting your work and knowing everything you need to know to be a modern creator. Why is licensing so important for creators and brands to know about?

Stewart Cohen: Licensing's important because that's all a creator has. So it's your intellectual property and by. Owning it, you get to license it and it could reap rewards downstream.

Sean Weisbrot: How can you ensure that you actually own your content?

Stewart Cohen: Well, in, in the case of, say, if you're a photographer or videographer or even a writer, you, there's the US Copyright Office, you could register your work. That's one way that that is the only way, it's the copyright laws.

Sean Weisbrot: So for example, when I'm uploading something to YouTube, do I no longer own that content?

Stewart Cohen: I think there are, there's so much fine print, Sean, on the social channels about who owns what that I think it's worth a read, and I think if one reads it, it would give you pause to just be posting on social networks. Unfortunately.

Sean Weisbrot: So I was mentioning to you previously, there are two types of licensing that I only recently noticed on YouTube. 'cause I was going through my channel, uh, settings there, there's two. One is the standard YouTube license, one is the Creative Commons license. And while I thought, and I've been using the Creative Commons license for years, I realized that actually the standard YouTube license is better and here's why. Really quickly, the standard YouTube license says basically, you can't download my content. From my, uh, channel and you can't remix, you can't reuse, you can't cut, you can't do anything without my permission. And if you do, it's illegal. Basically, the Creative Commons says you could do whatever you want. And I was using Creative Commons and I recently changed it because I was like, I don't want people to do that stuff.

Stewart Cohen: You are correct and the Creative Commons. There are some, I think you have to register it, and there is some money that's collected under the Creative Commons clause that if you're registered as a creator, you get a certain percentage of it and it's a really minuscule percentage. And the truth is you need to really try to protect your own copyright on everything you do. If you think about when you write a book, you know people get ISBN numbers 'cause it's registered with the Library of Congress. When you take a photograph, if you register it with the copyright office, you are the I. Certifiable owner of that work. So then if you, if you do not register your work, aside from making it harder to protect you, a also cannot go after any kind of damages if people use your work without permission.

Sean Weisbrot: So I had someone come to me wanting to license my content for the purpose of tossing it into an AI and training it. What I didn't know at the time, I told them no. I said, I looked at the contract, I said, this doesn't look right for me. You're telling me it's worth $30,000, but I'm not able to have any control over what you use it for or any revenue that it generates in the future. I'm just complete, basically just selling it to you one time, and then you have control over that license, which is insane. But what I didn't realize in that moment was that because I had the Creative Commons license set up, they could have actually just trained it without my permission.

Stewart Cohen: Ooh. Yeah. Yeah. Well there are a lot of lawsuits going on right now about these big AI companies that just scraped the web. Um, initially when this was all starting, and I know Getty Images is, is has one giant lawsuit with somebody, and you would see it when you're generating pictures, you'll see the Getty Watermark. Some of them might thing. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, it's, it's an interesting time and then a lot of collections in, in the photography world. Have licensed large language models to scrape their archive to. So it has all that information in it. So when prompts are coming in, like say there was a picture of us here on the screen, you know, they might, you know, just use part of Sean's face, you know, something like that. It's, it's, it's just mushing it all together. So if somebody puts prompt on guy in red shirt, you know, with headphones and a microphone in front of him, it'll probably take something, it might not be everything, but it'll be something from. The picture we're looking at here.

Sean Weisbrot: So I know that after the episode is recorded, Riverside will generate some clips as well as some, uh, like thumbnails. And I will usually share one of these thumbnails on LinkedIn rather than the thumbnail that my editor created on YouTube so that when people go to YouTube, they see that thumbnail, and sometimes they'll create Studio Ghibli versions of the thumbnails inside of Riverside. Or they'll do a baby AI version of us. I, I don't know if you saw, I published a short. That they automatically generated a baby version of me and one of my guests who is 74 years old. And it was hilarious because the guest was talking about how it was hard and he wanted to get off like, like life is difficult and he wants to get off the, the hamster wheel. And he is like, he's like a baby, but he is 74 years old. I was like, this is amazing. Is not, that's

Stewart Cohen: really funny. Well, I mean, look, the AI stuff is, there's a lot of crazy stuff happening.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, but, but I didn't ask it to make that, and so I lost control over, I lost creative control over my content by allowing this, the company that is recording this,

Stewart Cohen: right, to

Sean Weisbrot: use an AI to generate something that didn't exist before.

Stewart Cohen: And I think it's, it's becoming, you know, you could, you could spend all your time managing your rights. It's nearly like you're, you're fighting a fire hose. Yeah. I mean, it, it's, it's a really strange time in, in rights and licensing and I think it, everyone needs to create their own kind of mantra about how they're gonna protect their rights because they could be eroded so quickly currently. So how do you protect your clients? We register our copyright on everything we create. And then there are some, um, there are some companies out there that kind of scrape the web and anywhere where they see images or or video clips, they'll send you a list of them and you have to go through it and see if it's an authorized use or not. So it's a lot of work on our side. And then if it's an unauthorized use, of course they go back, they find the person whose website it is, or the person who's advertising it, and they, and they try to collect, you know, penalties and or, uh, like just infringements. You know,

Sean Weisbrot: how much does it cost every year to manage these rights for your clients and defend their rights?

Stewart Cohen: It costs a lot of time. It doesn't cost anything in terms of their services that will do it. Without an upfront fee, but they take, you know, whether it's 30 to 50% of any kind of settlements they get.

Sean Weisbrot: What do you think is like an annual amount of money that these companies might be generating? I.

Stewart Cohen: I don't know. Honestly. I know back in the day it was even more because there was, when, when there were unauthorized uses, there were bigger penalties because everyone knew if they were stealing a photo, that they were stealing a photo. Today with the way socials share and everything, there are a lot of people that are innocent to the fact that, oh, what do you mean? I couldn't use that? It was online. Hmm. So I think the, the public is not really. On people's intellectual property, and I think it's, it would be great for some of the big tech players to really have something written about what intellectual property is and why it's valuable. And, and I, you know, we've read articles about it and they talk about, look, a writer can't write unless they're getting paid for what they're doing. And a photographer, you know, if, if they're just taking photos on their own and trying to license them. They're making their living licensing them. So if you're not paying the creator a royalty, it makes it hard for them to make a living and to continue to create.

Sean Weisbrot: I think that was part of the charm of blockchain, was trying to figure out how to help people get paid, but blockchain also did a really bad job of it because the companies didn't know how to be profitable and or didn't understand how economics work.

Stewart Cohen: I gotta tell you, I am with you on that one. A hundred percent. When blockchain, when I first started reading about it, and it's been a couple years, right? I was like, this is perfect. I mean, it's perfect. You register at once and there is a, there is a, you got a trail of everywhere where that's been used. It's perfect. It's a perfect way to monetize content. It's a perfect way for people to actually know what they're paying for, and then it just kind of spiraled outta control and was gone. It's because of capitalism and actually the biggest corruption of, of all time has kind of come from the whole crypto blockchain world. You know?

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah. I I think I know where you're going with it, but we should probably avoid mentioning it in order to get, in order to not be demonetized on YouTube. I,

Stewart Cohen: exactly. We don't need to talk about it, but I'm with you a hundred percent about Yes. How do you track things in today's day and age, and it's very difficult.

Sean Weisbrot: So I wanna go back to you claiming that the tech company should be responsible for this. I think Section two 30 is designed to let them wash their hands of any of these things. So it's every man for himself out there. Then. And even if Section two 30 didn't exist. Mm-hmm. I think these big tech companies don't have any incentive to educate the masses on intellectual property. Why would they care? It's nothing to do with them.

Stewart Cohen: Good point. So what does that leave? That leaves the, the little guy as always out in the cold a bit.

Sean Weisbrot: Right. Well, that's capitalism, isn't it? It is so, so it's every man for himself. Yeah. That's why we're talking about rights and trying to protect ourselves.

Stewart Cohen: Well and of course the first place that our rights went away was when there were, when we had resellers for our content in China and, and those all spiraled outta control. 'cause you lost all ability to track any usages. When did that happen? It was probably about 10 years ago. And then a lot of Sounds about right. Yeah, exactly. And, and so, you know, we've stopped distributing anything to China, although it's a huge market. But yeah, it just wasn't right for us. 'cause I, I really was not getting, there was no communication back and forth. I mean, there was a lot of turnover in the companies there, and then all of a sudden they just forgot who you were, but they didn't give you your content back.

Sean Weisbrot: I just finished a sponsorship deal with a Chinese company. They paid me to make a single video about their, uh, newest features that were coming out. And then another Chinese company, a few days later, after that video came out was like, we love that. We want you to do that for us. Uh, well, it was, it was a PR firm in China, another PR firm in China, second one, uhhuh, and they said, we love that. We want you to do the same thing for our client. Here's a link to the website that you would be reviewing. And their, their budget's not very high. Can you know, give us a quote. I looked, it's Tencent.

Stewart Cohen: Oh, no way. So

Sean Weisbrot: wealthiest, the wealthiest con company in China, and the guy had been talking to me in English because the PR firms in China are not researching my channel and they don't know that I speak Chinese. So I responded in Chinese. I go, I know, and, and I used the company's Chinese name. I go, I know exactly who Tengxun is.

Stewart Cohen: Yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: And I know exactly what their budget could be. This is what I'm gonna charge if you want to make me, if you want me to make a video for them. And what'd they say? They haven't said anything yet. They probably thought I was asking too much. Like, I don't care. That's, that's my price. If you want me to make a video for, because, 'cause then what do I have to register as a foreign agent because Chinese companies are now paying me. You know, like where does it end?

Stewart Cohen: It exactly. Where does it end? And you're right, I mean, it, it, it's, it's becoming a big thing to manage your rights and to chase them and protect them. And one hopes that the majority of people realize, you know, that content costs money. But I don't think so because I don't, I, and I don't look, I, I own a licensing company, I don't think. We've been great at educating the public. Either there's a generation of kids that have come up that innocently enough had no idea that material on the Internet's copyrighted and like, why can't we use it? I mean, you know, you mean torrenting is illegal? Exactly. Um, so, so, okay, so how do you fight that? Right. How do you, you know. Or, or do you figure, what is the word that companies have, you know, like how much product that they lose every year just to, in the manufacturing process?

Sean Weisbrot: I, I know, I know that there's a term, I just don't remember what it is.

Stewart Cohen: Yeah. You know, I know it's, uh, but you're just figuring, look, you know, there's gonna be 20%, hopefully it's only 20% illegal usage, and you just gotta let it go.

Sean Weisbrot: It's like, uh, Walmart, if someone comes in to try to, uh, rob them, they just let it happen or not rob them, but if someone's like shoplifting, they just don't bother because it's too much of a hassle to write a report, make the paperwork, and they're like, ah, that's fine. Like, their profit is hundreds of billions of dollars. They, right. Like what do they care about? A $5 item?

Stewart Cohen: Yeah. Well, I mean. And I think, I think Target did it too. And a lot of it was they were afraid for the safety of their employees and lawsuits and stuff. You know, I maybe it's called slippage. I know. I don't know

Sean Weisbrot: that That might be the term.

Stewart Cohen: Yeah. But my point is, is like I look at it like, look, you're gonna lose something every year based on that. You can chase everything. And I know people that do chase everything and they chase it to the extent that. We're having to prove, you know, say in the licensing world, we see some of our creators that are chasing every usage and it comes back to us, but we're the ones licensing it for them. I'm like, dude, I mean, you gotta give us some room here to license it, you know? And I think, yeah, it's a challenging time, but I do think that everybody should somehow register their work in whatever medium you work in. With some sort of copyright office.

Sean Weisbrot: Hey, just gimme 10 seconds of your time. I really appreciate you listening to the episode so far and I hope you're loving it. And if you are, I would love to ask you to subscribe to the channel because what we do is a lot of we, and every week we bring you a new guest and a new story, and what we do requires so much love. So that we can bring you something amazing and every week we're trying really hard to get better guests that have better stories and improve our ability to tell their stories. So your subscription lets the algorithm know that what we're doing is fantastic and no commitment. It's free to do. And if you don't like what we're doing later on, you can always unsubscribe. And either way, we would love a, like if you don't feel like subscribing at this time. So what are good terms for a licensing agreement? What, how do you convince your clients to take a deal?

Stewart Cohen: Well, I think, I think li well just, I, I could talk a lot in terms of the image licensing 'cause that's kind of my specialty. And it used to be that you would charge per use that somebody said, I'd like to use this image and it still happens this way. Uh, I'd like to use this image on greeting cards. For the next two years and nobody else could use it, and they pay for that and you protect it. Then it became, something came out probably around in 2010 ish, royalty free licensing, which meaning if they license an image, they could use it wherever they want, however they want for as long as they want. So, right. Then we gave it away and, and, and part, part of that were the big players. Thinking it's so hard to protect rights these days. So if we do, if we do this royalty free, we sell it. Once we collect the money, boom, we're done. And there's no paperwork to track.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, that's not cool. But that's what happened

Stewart Cohen: and it made it easier for the big players, be it the ShutterStocks of the world and the Gettys of the world to manage it. And keep it simple and do one transaction and boom, you're done. That's not fair to the creator. It's not fair to the creator, but the creators had to sign a contract agreeing to it. Well then they have to give them a lot of money or else it's not worth it. Well, that's where licensing went down the tube. I mean, that's where the big money in licensing went down the tube. Personally, I was very fortunate to do very well in licensing early in my career. And I've watched the slide of, you know, the revenue per license going down. At the same time though, I still like to do what I do, and I realize, okay, so instead of figuring that each respective license will make, you know, whatever, no less than $300. Now you gotta think that each respective license will make no less than say, $30. I mean, it's gone down tenfold easily in the last 15 years. So a lot of people, a lot of the big players, the creators have stopped playing in the game because they feel it's just not worth the time. So then how do they make money? Exactly. Well, you go back to, you know, think of the record companies, you know, think about Spotify. So where, you know, bands used to make so much money on albums. And now you're down to how much do they make per million downloads? You know, they're still making money, but it's a fraction of what they were making when they were licensed, when they were selling albums. And it's the same kind of thing, and bands had to go back on the road. That's why we see all these reunion tours. How they make money now is being on the road touring and selling, you know, swag at the shows because they, their licensing revenue, their, their album sales have dropped so much so. In, in the similar way, if you look at, say Joe Photographer, who was making a lot of money, licensing their content, their existing content, now we need to get assignments. So we need to continue to do assignments. 'cause those pay per, you know, they pay per assignment.

Sean Weisbrot: It's like, um, being commissioned by the king in the 16 hundreds. Yeah. Like having a wealthy patron.

Stewart Cohen: Right. Well, having a wealthy patron never hurt. You know, having people that love you, that will continue to hire you and pay you for your services is, is always a good thing. Granted, licensing is, is was a way to monetize your art, your collection, your. Any, any intellectual property.

Sean Weisbrot: So do you now have a stable of wealthy patrons that you're introducing to your, your creators?

Stewart Cohen: I wish that was the case, Sean. Um, no. I think for, in terms of the creators, it's every man for himself. There are a lot of people who create still photography and video who really love the medium and will continue to do it because they love the medium. What happened, actually for a minute, and I'll just rewind for a sec, is there were people that started to create work just for the licensing and they weren't really super talented, but they were doing it 'cause it seemed like licensing was an easy way. You know, you could create subpar work, put it out there, people would license it. Hey, I'm gonna, I'm making my living doing this. And you know, what the industry has done is definitely weeded that out. There's still a lot of players, you know, there's still players that are creating a lot of content now with AI and, and, and pushing it into licensing content. And some of it's great and some of it's garbage, and I think it's making it harder for the end user to sort out what they need and, and now of course, what do you mean by what do they need? Well, I mean. So say, say you're a small digital advertising agency. Digital marketing firm, or you're a, a small corporation and you're looking for a picture to illustrate, you know. We, we serve coffee. When you come in the store, whatever they could go into and say in, in our search bar, in super stock search bar and search, you know, small business, coffee, you know, and everything will come up. What's gotten better today is search on our end. So if you think about us being small, managing, say 36 million assets, how do you find what's right for you? Or you think of somebody big like Getty, who with 3 million, 300 million assets. How do you find the exact perfect thing? So what is getting better and what AI has really helped with is search. So that way you could really pinpoint exactly what you're looking for and, and hopefully find an image or a video clip that matches exactly what you're looking for.

Sean Weisbrot: Sorry, do you mean $36 million worth of assets, or 36 million individual pieces of content?

Stewart Cohen: 36 million individual pieces of content.

Sean Weisbrot: Okay. And so AI is making it easier for people to search through the content they want to license, but people using AI to create content are mud, are muddying the waters.

Stewart Cohen: Indeed, that's, that's pretty good. And of course, what we have to do is we have to curate what comes into our collection. So we have to make a judgment call as to if it's spammy, so to speak, or if it's relevant and what, you know, what, what's important to us is that we deliver a quality product to our customers.

Sean Weisbrot: But can AI generated content be licensable since technically the model shouldn't have had access to the training data it had access to, in order to have the knowledge it needed to generate that asset for the human to then prompt it into existence? It's like, it's like a monkey owning content. It, they're not allowed because they're not a human.

Stewart Cohen: Right. Well, luckily you have some knowledge in this and you're absolutely right and I think a lot of the large advertising agencies. And or, um, corporations will not use anything generated with ai. They may come up with concepts on what they wanna create using ai, but they will not license any AI content for that specific reason. Although, I will say what's happening now is, say for instance, um, some of the large players will say if you create, and they're, they're incorporating. Um, AI image creation tools into their software platforms and saying they have rights to everything on their platform. So if you create something on our platform using our generator, we will give you a copyright to it. We will indemnify you. Against any claims that come against you.

Sean Weisbrot: But isn't your generation, hasn't that platform trained its data on the content owned by all of the human creators that are Well,

Stewart Cohen: A, according, according to certain people, they're saying no, they're only training their large learning models. The LLMs are only being trained on what they have in their archive.

Sean Weisbrot: Right. But isn't that taking away from the creator who's uploaded the content into their archive now? Now you're stealing from the creator to allow somebody else.

Stewart Cohen: Absolutely. So then what happens is, on a quarterly or semi-annual basis, any revenue generated from AI within your platform, everybody whose works in there gets a piece of it. So say a generated. I don't know, just for lack of anything else. Say it generated a hundred thousand dollars. So you have to divvy up the a hundred thousand between your 2000 creators and they just get like a Creative Commons license. That's like a creative Commons license.

Sean Weisbrot: So between you and me, no one else is listening. Do you think that's actually gonna happen or do you think they're just saying that they're gonna do that?

Stewart Cohen: No, I think it, I think it does happen. It's, it's, it's fractions of pennies on the dollar. I mean, so if you think about. I guess you could equate it more to a Spotify model. Not, not even. Not even really. It's less than probably.

Sean Weisbrot: Well, people wouldn't have to view my, my content in order for me to get paid. That's great.

Stewart Cohen: Yeah. But if I get like one three hundredths of a cent for every time some of my content is put in there. How much am I really gonna get? So you're gonna get $5 like in the year 2060, you know?

Sean Weisbrot: Right. And the more content that's put on there, the more people have to be shared with. So then you might have people that are constantly pushing content using AI just to make sure that they can get these fractions of a pennies for having done no work.

Stewart Cohen: That's correct.

Sean Weisbrot: So you can mess up all the humans that are making work themselves. So what

Stewart Cohen: this is driving me to do is try to create more of a niche collection and. Go back to really hands-on. It can't just be automated, you know, press, go and let it go. I mean, I think you need customer service. I think you need curation. I think you need some, I'm not gonna say handholding, but you, you, you need, you need curation with your contributors. You need curation to see what goes on your site. And then you need a sales team to really work closely with your clients to find exactly what's right for them.

Sean Weisbrot: Who, who is your client, the creator or the buyer?

Stewart Cohen: My client is the creator. No, I'm sorry. Whoa, whoa, sorry, sorry. Scratch that please. My client is the buyer. My supplier is the creator.

Sean Weisbrot: Okay. So, uh, the reason why I ask you that question, it's, it's really funny because I used to raise funds for startups and I used to think that the startup was my client because the startup was gonna be paying me a commission from the money they received from the investor, right? But I wasn't closing any deals because I was pitching the wrong investors. Ah, when I, when I realized that my client is actually the investor. And I started to become friendly with different investors. Then I knew what they wanted, and then I started to look for startups that had what they wanted. Right. Then I started closing deals, and so when startup founders would come to me and go, do you think investors like this? I can go look, no, it's crap. They're not gonna invest in this.

Stewart Cohen: Right, right.

Sean Weisbrot: So I, I could say, yeah, I know you think that I'm here to represent you, but the reality is I'm here to represent the investor. You're asking me to introduce you to my network of investors.

Stewart Cohen: Right.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm not building a network of startups to introduce to investors. I'm building a network of investors that startups want access to. You're paying me if I introduce you to someone that pays you.

Stewart Cohen: Right, right, right.

Sean Weisbrot: So that's why I was like, oh, who, who is your focus is?

Stewart Cohen: No. Our focus should be the end user, the the customer. And if say for instance, you said, you know, I'm, I need content of, you know, people enjoying the coast of Portugal. What my job is to do is to go back to our suppliers, our contributors, and say, Hey, there is a need for content that's shot on the coast of Portugal, and anybody with. Who has the ability to access that content or create it or go to Portugal, and that's how it used to work and create content that's like, Hey Stuart, here's all this content from Portugal you were looking for. And then what I would do is I would go back to you and say, Hey Sean, look at all this content that we created that hopefully is right for what you're looking for.

Sean Weisbrot: Hmm. Makes sense. So what's the most important thing you've learned in life so far?

Stewart Cohen: The most important thing I've learned in life as I sit here, and actually I did think about that, is that it, nothing stays the same ever. It's continually evolving. When you think you made it, it's like, yeah, you made it today, but tomorrow's a new day. When you think you're doing something the way that you know it, it continual evolution. And I think the earlier one can accept the fact that nothing remains the same, the more successful you'll be.