Hi all. I’m going to start addressing some of the questions and concerns that have been raised.
Firstly, I appreciate all the candid comments that have come through so far. I also appreciate that there have been several requests for answers in plain language - but as we’re clarifying updates to our terms, some degree of legal wording is necessary. If you need further clarification, just use this thread to ask.
There are a lot of questions and comments to work through, and we’ll continue to respond in this thread - this is just the first batch. It’s also important to note that the absence of specific responses does not imply the validity or truth of any statement we haven’t addressed here.
Does this mean I can start uploading AI-generated content to sell through Envato?
At this point, we are still not accepting AI-generated content on Elements and Market. This choice is based on our commitment to protect the rights and copyrights of our authors and creative contributors worldwide. Currently, as many of you would know, the proliferation of unethical external AI content generation models in the marketplace makes it difficult to verify the source of content and ensure fair compensation for creatives involved.
We are keeping a close eye on the advancements in the ethical AI space, and will advise if there is a change in our policy on AI-generated content for Market and Elements.
Will you have perpetual rights even if I take down my content from your platform?
As is the case today, you will continue to have the right to take down your items at any point in time.
If you choose to remove your items after 1st June 2023, they will not be listed for sale on our site or used in any new third party arrangement from the date of takedown.
The inclusion of the perpetual right is to account for the situation where you request the removal of your item after your item has been used in a third party arrangement.
Once you have removed an item from our site, it will not be included as part of any new third party arrangement.
The new rights allow Envato to distribute content. How does this affect exclusivity on Envato Market?
Your exclusive items on Envato Market will continue to earn a bigger share of revenue compared to the non-exclusive items. However, this may not be true when your content is distributed to third parties, and as is the case today, it does not impact your subscriber share on Elements.
What will the revenue share be for future distribution?
Royalties from third parties are a new form of incremental revenue for our Authors above and beyond the industry-leading revenue share from Envato sites. We expect that the fees for these third party partnerships will vary on a case-by-case basis.
Will I have visibility over which items are in use outside of Elements/Market? What happens if my items are already on those platforms? How can we track piracy or misuse of items?
Third party platforms will generally have measures in place to prevent duplication of non-exclusive content in their libraries. However, this depends on their content policies. If a customer purchases your item from a third party due to our listing, you will be compensated based on the terms agreed between Envato and that third party at the time.
You will have visibility of the overall revenue generated from third-party use/royalties, however you will not see a detailed item-level breakdown.
We will take careful measures to conduct evaluations of our partnerships with third parties, with an aim to minimise the risk of intentional misuse and piracy, to the best extent possible.
Can you explain how AI could be trained for each asset category?
AI could be used to solve a broad set of problems including search and discovery tooling, metadata creation and generating content from text prompts, based on what we know today. What an AI uses to learn, how it learns, and what it is capable of doing can vary depending on the content type. This will also change depending on how technology emerges and evolves.
We want to stress that our focus, now and in the future, is to harness technology in a way that creates opportunity for our community. Again, we’ll continue to listen carefully to your feedback and questions: if you need more clarification, post here and we’ll respond to more questions in this thread.
You can also see more about our plans for the future on the Envato Blog here where we summarise Envato’s position, as presented by Hichame last week at the annual CEPIC congress.