Think about it:
If top sellers accept the deal they will lose the rights to their music, because AI would literally do whatever it wanted with the music.
If top sellers don’t accept the deal, considering that most are exclusive authors, they will lose all their income.
Whatever they do, they will lose everything, but they are not complaining. They have said absolutely nothing, why? Because this does not affect them.
I have top selling item and received exactly the same letter. And i am complaining. Because i need opt out button. And clear understanding how my intellectual rights will be paid and protected.
Ain’t this just beautiful? Quoting Envato (and do not trust anyone but Envato, and do not fear anyone but Envato):
Without having full details of future arrangements, we cannot provide you with details of the fee payable to you, the Author.
Our rights might include:
· Distributing your items on content platforms across the globe.
Ok, so we’ve been exclusive so far for YEARS, but in a few weeks we’ll be forced to allow the mercyful and all mighty corp to distribute our music “across any content platform across the globe in perpetuity” for whatever they say (I know, they can’t provide us details yet) and we’ll have to agree to feed a neural learning platform that sooner or later will replace us.
Ahhhh, we musicians, would have made such obedient workers in the pre-industrial days. Pride of the landlords.
I try to remain impartial as a voluntary community moderator. That said, I have read every single response here and it’s hard to find any sentiments in here that I can’t empathise with.
I feel for every single author here who has poured their blood, sweat and tears into building a quality portfolio. You guys are the real MVPs without which the platform could never have reached such heights. From my perspective, the fabric of Envato’s success comes from their original community-centric business ethic, and is deeply intertwined with the hard work of its authors. Never forget that.
As a loyal exclusive Envato author who has invested time and energy into producing the best assets I can for this platform, I will say that the way this is currently being worded feels incredibly disrespectful.
An ‘opt-out’ to allowing AI to study our work would be a good start, but the real elephant in the room is the (currently) opaque wording surrounding third party licensing.
Personally, I am staying optimistic for the time being, but my trust in the platform is permanently altered. I’m looking forward to seeing some of the official responses, because it’s going to take a lot more explanation to convince me not to begin looking elsewhere.
100%
Agree with everything you’ve said here. Trust affected. Need to see explanations from Envato, which, well, delayed.
You’re wrong my friend. There are no chosen ones. Some people don’t read forums, some are just commercial bussiness not single contributors, some are not exclusive users. That’s the global problem, not only this stock library case.
And cherry on the top - today’s Elements Payoneer payout failure to many authors, including me. @BenLeong , need help. Yesterday Market payment went smooth, but today Elements is failed. Opened support ticket, the number is 3208480
The system of how Elements payments calculated at least described clearly.
Too harsh, man.
It’s scary. Also overwhelmed with fears
First there was the introduction of Elements, then authors messed around with ADP which destroyed the market and now AI. We are all to blame the the demise of sync licensing although having a rediculous change in TOC’s does not help.
I did get your message, looks like it was deleted here. The one you are not allowed to criticise are the one in power. 
We will be leaving Envato this week if this situation is not rectified. While we’re not as impacted by the change as much at CodeCanyon, I don’t believe anyone has paid enough attention to this sentence:
Developing a ‘test/build’ environment with a third party to build new product offerings, features or services.
Why is this so vague? And what does this mean?
For now I’m interpreting it in the worst light possible: Envato can take our products/ideas and re-implement them via a third-party, then test against our own product. I.e, they can take our unique works (code, assets, design, and all) and develop derivatives with their name on it, where they retain complete ownership and give us nothing in return; and thanks to the generative AI and perpetuity clause: they can have an AI do it. While this is not exactly feasible without human involvement at the present, think of the future for a moment. A couple of years ago AI art generation was a joke, but look at where we’re at today.
Another reason is that we’re not a US-based entity, so we don’t have much of a legal recourse against them due to financial/logistical considerations. As such, we’d rather not work with them at all.
Envato was once a blooming market and a good solution for us, but as the years went on, it has gotten worse and worse. Near the beginning, we had to work with them because there weren’t that many alternatives available and we were still starting out, then later on and after we built a business, whilst it wasn’t ideal, it was an extra stream of income. Now that extra stream of income has become an extra liability. It’s no longer worth it.
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.
Thanks for weighing in.
However, it’s still completely unclear what these third-party agreements might entail. What’s to stop Envato from saying “We’ve entered into an agreement to make all Envato-hosted content available via *******.com. You will receive $1 per item in your portfolio”?
Certainly, that might turn out to be a great deal for Envato, but disastrous for authors.
There does seem to be some Authors that didn’t see the email. Is Envato going to be adding a pop up on the dashboard about it, like they do for surveys etc.?
As I understand it, please correct me if I’m wrong.
The income from the third party agreement will not be higher than the current income from the Envato market because the third party will receive some share.
A third party can create a subscription service, such as Elements, where the items will be distributed. The result is much less income.
AI developers can store your items in some sort of coded math model, and when someone decides to delete their item, those models won’t be deleted.
For some reason, AI does not want to learn from its own creations.
One third party is AI developers. Can you share at least an example of another third party - maybe it’s a different stock market?
Will the AI have physical access to the item, will it be able to download, parse, encode the item, or will it only have access to the items title, description, tags?
Watch now folks live, OPEN AI CEO is testifying in SENATE HEARINGS in the USA
“AI developers might store your items in some encoded mathematical model, and when someone decide remove their item, those models wont be deleted”
I guess so…how does AI unlearn? It’s already done!