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About The Publisherspeak Podcast
Real stories. Honest reflections. Conversations about leadership, change, and the work that shapes our world.
Hosted by Sowmya Mahadevan, Chief Orchestrator at Kriyadocs, The Publisherspeak Podcast features interviews with people making meaningful moves—inside and outside the world of scholarly publishing. From academic leaders and publishing professionals to coaches and change-makers, each episode goes beyond job titles to explore personal journeys and the mindsets behind impactful work.
In this episode
Host Sowmya speaks with Leslie Lansman, Anderton, Head of Permissions & Licensing at Springer Nature, about copyright, authorship, AI, and more.
With a legal background and extensive experience navigating the intersection of law, publishing, and technology, Leslie helps us unpack what copyright means in an AI-enabled world.
Dive into the conversation below or watch the episode here.
Full conversation
Sowmya: Hey everyone and welcome back to The Publisherspeak Podcast. I'm your host, Sowmya. Today's guest is someone who brings both deep legal expertise and real-world publishing insights to the table: Leslie Lansman.
Leslie is Head of Permissions and Licensing at Springer Nature and also the Director of ALPSP. Lesley has vast experience helping publishers, authors and institutions navigate the tricky world of copyright, content sharing and licensing. And as we'll hear today, her perspective is especially important right now when AI is challenging our old definitions of authorship rights and creative work. Today we will talk about how copyright is evolving in this fast-moving world and creating awareness in the community about these critical topics and more. Plus, Leslie breaks down some really big concepts in a very simple way that's refreshingly easy to understand. So, let's dive right into it.
Hi, Leslie. It's wonderful to have you here on The Publisherspeak Podcast. And you know what? I've interviewed several types of people on the podcast, but I've never had a lawyer who works in publishing on the podcast. So, I'm really excited to talk to you here.
But before we dive into the podcast, how did you get here? Lawyer... Publishing... How did this happen?
Leslie: Hello and thanks again for inviting me to be part of this podcast. I do think it's great that you put these conversations together and I am looking forward to having a chat about my absolute favorite topic, copyright. How did I get here? I really have always been driven by an absolute love of copyright as a subject.
When I was quite young, I wanted to be an actress. I mustered up my courage to ask my mother if I could go to acting school and she quite succinctly said no, but that I could go to law school if I worked very hard and one day fight for all the actresses.
And indeed, it is kind of the course that I ended up pursuing. So, I went to law school in the US, ended up working in the US for about 10 years, moved back to the UK, which is where I grew up. Thought I would go into academia. So, I did quite a bit of teaching, pursued a PhD. Decided academia was not the cause for me and ended up in publishing, which I now absolutely love! Really working on the business side of publishing, licensing solutions, or how we can practically work with this thing called copyright. The ultimate and vital protection for the creative industries.
Sowmya: That's fantastic to hear, and I might say I think you would have made a lovely actress!
But most of us here don't really have a legal background, and I think we have a very vague understanding of the word copyright. So, before we dive into the details of it, if you had to very briefly talk about what copyright means to a very lay person who has absolutely no legal background, what would that be?
Leslie: I think one thing, one of the reasons that I love copyright is that it's very, very fuzzy. You don't have to do anything to get a copyright. So, unlike a trademark or rights patent or design rights, where you have to go through some kind of formal paperwork process, you don't have to do anything. Your doodles, your child's artwork, all of this is protected by the exact same copyright that protects computer programs and source and object code. The ubiquity is everywhere, and it's tied up with what makes us human beings.
I think that sometimes the biggest misconception is how widespread copyright is, particularly if you work in the creative industries, therefore how much copyright you may own or be a licenser or licensee of. So, really identifying what it is that is copyright, I think is a good place to begin.
As to the absolute biggest misconception that I hear about copyright, it is probably around the term fair use. I feel that so many people label things fair use. They use this word but they don't know what it means. Fair use is a very specific defense to copyright infringement that exists in the US and doesn't really exist beyond that. So, if you can get those two concepts, I think you're on a better path to understanding a lot of the issues that may pop up, particularly for publishers, than otherwise.
Sowmya: Absolutely. So, let's get to the other hot topic that's being discussed everywhere today, which is AI. When you're talking about AI, copyright has a very muddled understanding, right? Not everybody understands how copyright can even play out in this world of AI.
Where do you see all of this going? What is this intersection between AI and copyright? Can you educate us a little bit about how copyright plays out in this era of AI?
Leslie: Well, it has given me a certain justification for the decades that I have spent studying copyright, when lots of my other legal friends were saying, why were you doing such a conflict like copyright? No one is going to be interested in this now.
We have copyright on the headline news, particularly here in the UK, with what's going on with the “make it fair” Creative Rights in AI Coalition. It is quite an exciting time to be involved in AI and copyright. But one thing I would really caution about is thinking that this is all brand new, that copyright has never been here before, that copyright is somehow not up to the challenge. I don't want to label things tech arguments or what other people may say, but you do hear some reports of people say, oh, if we have to comply with copyright, AI will break down. It will be absolutely impossible for us to do business. I would throw a lot of salt on those types of arguments.
I think copyright is very robust. It's been around depending on the jurisdiction for hundreds and hundreds of years. This is not the first time copyright has dealt with new technologies. I always like to remember the good old times of the piano roll. Back in the late 1800s when the piano roll first came around, which was a mechanical way of playing music, everyone was like, what are you talking about? This has nothing to do with copyright. Music comes out of a human, it's something else. And so those same arguments I think are now echoed through peer-to-peer file sharing, all of these other technologies.
Sowmya: That's in a strange way very comforting to hear because while the technology is changing, how copyright and technology interfaces is a constant thing that has been happening throughout history, right? So, it's not new.
But AI is stirring up a lot of new questions around authorship and rights, and how legal definitions are evolving in response to that.
For instance, the US Copyright Office has taken the position that AI can't be an author, but that co-created works may be protected if there's enough human input. Now how do we interpret what is the threshold of creativity?
Leslie: This kind of comes back to what I was talking about earlier. An understanding to begin with—how do I know that I'm even dealing with something that has to do with copyright? This is really one of the first steps in any copyright analysis is understanding is it copyright or is it not originality, creativity, authorship, author's own individual choices. These are the types of language and words we use in trying to understand if copyright applies. Because what we're looking for is original human authorship, meaning, you know, original choices made by a human author.
So again, I think that copyright, with all of its flexibilities, with its gray areas, is very fit for addressing these issues. And they will be settled in the way that most copyright issues are settled by businesses and by practices. It really is a bit up to what happens in the market, how creators publish their works, how those are disseminated, et cetera, et cetera, and ideas of joint authorship.
The idea that we can have a technological tool that helps us to some degree to create something, but we can still see those original human-authored creative choices in the underlying work. That will still be the test for whether or not something is copyright protected.
I do think, generally, and you can see what's going on in a few different jurisdictions, whether it be some of the judicial cases, the US Copyright Office report that you mentioned, that type of analysis will probably end up holding sway, is that if we still see copyright in there, we still see those human choices. How you get there, this is something that will have to be figured out, the vagaries of it and especially the edges along the way.
Sowmya: So, there's a lot that we need to sort of figure out along the way. But, you know, let me ask you this question, actually.
I was reading a news article just this morning about the Nvidia CEO, talking about, will AI take away jobs? But he was talking about how AI will not take away jobs, but humans will have to consider other human beings who are able to use AI to their advantage. So, you know, the people are going to become much more supercharged. The ones who are able to use AI to their advantage are going to become more productive, more creative in some sense.
Bringing that thought process to the authors as well—you're going to have more and more authors who are going to use AI. I don't think that you can put a mandate to say authors cannot use AI. It's just going to happen. So, as publishers or as authors, what is your take on authors using AI for producing their content from a copyright perspective?
Leslie: Well, I would also expand this. It's not just authors. Every single person in every single company throughout your organization is going to be using AI, either through tools that you support them through with training, explanations, or just on their own.
The genie is out of the bottle. We can't put it back in and pretend that the great scrape didn't happen, that we are not where we are. And there's lots of things for judicial courts to figure out about what has already happened. Going forward, I really think that we do have to realize that even if you are a right holder, you are also an AI user. So, how do you incorporate AI to see the best, to make whatever your product is, whatever it is you're publishing, the best it can be. And for authors in particular, I think that there can be tremendous assistance, easier translations, particularly depending on your discipline. It might make it easier to do certain checks on whatever it is that you may have published.
Sowmya: Let's bring the spotlight back onto the publishers. If publishers have to communicate or to talk to their authors about rights, permissions, copyrights and things like that, what would your recommendations be to make sure that that communication is quite clear and it's very easy and effective for authors to understand what all these terms really mean?
I think that is a big challenge everywhere. I think even if we look at the words being used in AI: “artificial intelligence.” Is it really “intelligence”?
I thought it was quite interesting, the paper that was published by Apple this week, really challenging some of the assumptions of what some of the other AI engines can do. There's lots of confusing language in all of this, but it really helps if you understand exactly who it is you're trying to communicate with and what their unique concerns and issues may be.
Authors are going to have obviously some very different types of concerns, particularly when it comes to citation, and there's lots of different opinions within that. There are many authors who very much want to ensure that if their work is going to be reused in AI context, it's clearly being looped back into the original so it can be transparent and clear as to where that content comes from.
Other authors are so concerned about miscommunication or how their work is going to be used that they really are not interested in those fine levels of attribution. So, I think that really understanding what it is your different audiences and your different stakeholder community groups, what their concerns are and then what kinds of policies and rights policies, will be needed in order to try to address, understand, and hopefully therefore, come up with solutions. Obviously, I do work in licensing, and I think it will ultimately be licensing. I do think in the future a lot of this will be able to dealt with through clear licensing agreements where people do understand exactly what is happening to their content, how it may be used, you know, the ethical boundaries or safeguards that may be put in place against any AI reuse, etc.
Sowmya: But you know, with the rise of AI bots and agents which are scraping content, I'm actually very confused, to be honest, about how licensing models will even apply in this particular case.
Where are these boundaries? How do you even set these boundaries? And that's something that I've not been able to wrap my head around at all.
Leslie: Licensing is a really big word, and right now there's lots and lots of, I would say, innovation going on in terms of different types of licensing. I would really encourage people to explore all of these.
Depending upon your market power, you may be able to do some kind of direct licensing because you have a repertoire that is large enough to be useful in some context. Individually there are people coming together and pooling together similar types of publishers into libraries. And I think that could be an option for allowing licensing to happen. And there's also a lot happening on the collective management side.
These are territorial licensing systems, licensing bodies. They're also engaged in various licensing practices for AI uses. And I really encourage everyone to understand more about what is going on with those, AI licensing for internal uses, etc. I do think licensing has a lot of options out there, but you do have to get people to want to come to license. And right now we start at a bit of a place, as you mentioned, where bots are everywhere, things are happening.
I think that if you are a rights holder, you also really need to look into how you can robustly protect your own content, particularly when it's digitally produced. So, if that's hard types of protections, things that are on the website, in your metadata, things like the TDM rep made available through the STM Research Integrity Hub, or if it's more sticky, types of rights identifiers.
Sowmya: So, what I'm hearing is that as AI technology evolves, licensing also needs to start evolving in order to handle the various scenarios that come out from this. There's a lot of innovations that are coming out, is what I'm hearing, as well as there has to be a roadmap for how the content is licensed and it is being used.
Leslie: New models of licensing as well. I think that, particularly in publishing, we've had one type of model when it comes to licensing. If you look at other creative industries, there's other types of models, whether that be subscription, ongoing tokens, whatever. There's all different types of licensing models out there. I think there will also be experimentation in our industry when it comes to different types of license models.
I do think it's an exciting time to be in licensing. As a job, I bet AI will still struggle right now to handle it.
Sowmya: I think I heard you use this term, but I'm not too familiar with it—What is a collective licensing scheme? Can you throw a little bit of light on that?
Leslie: Collective management organizations are national organizations, and there's usually one or more than one for various types of creative work. Here in the UK, we have the CLA, the Copyright Licensing Agency, which protects published works in particular. They usually operate with some type of statutory underpinning, and they operate differently depending upon what country you're in. They cover things like internal reuses of copyrighted content. So, if you want to forward emails or forward articles within your company, things like this, they might also cover school reuses, reuses of copyrighted content in schools. Lots of different types of areas where it really would be impossible to directly license each reuse. For instance, I'm going to license every time somebody wants to photocopy a few pages in a library, that's not really going to be directly licensed. That's really where collective management steps in.
They are also experimenting. There's a few different types of AI collective management licensing options out there right now from different territories. And this is really something that you could both participate in and also perhaps learn more about for your own organization. I would encourage you to check that out.
Sowmya: Certainly. I think that's something new that I learned today.
At Publisherspeak UK in May—and thank you once again for being a panelist at the conference—the panel was called “AI and I.” And you had a very interesting perspective there that I wanted to bring back into this conversation. You said that hallucinations in AI, which everybody seems to be very worried about, you said that is not really a glitch, but that's a feature, or that it's part of its function.
Can you tell me a little bit more about it? Usually, everyone's so worried, and they talk about AI hallucination as if it's a bad thing. But you were the only person that I heard so far who talked about it as a feature.
Leslie: It is. I don't think that means that we don't try to minimize its impact or try to understand what's happening. But to say that we're ever going to get rid of hallucinations, then we're not working with an AI system.
Just as if you have 20 people in a room and you ask, is it too hot or too cold, you will probably have 20 different responses as to what the weather is like within that room. Objectively, there is only one temperature that the internal room weather may be. This is what AI is like. It wants to give you, and only you, your own unique answer as opposed to someone else's.
And with all of that matching and reproducing, it will come up with things because it's not going to say nothing. You're never going to type a question in to any of these systems, and it's just not going to reply and say, “You've got me! I don't know what to say to that one.”
I think we have to understand more about how these systems work, what it is that they really do, and how they function. Another big misconception I hear is that you can only build AI using everything, everywhere, all at the same time. These are the only successful types of models that are being developed. I also challenge this. I think that a lot of the research that's been done says that smaller libraries of high-quality content can be equally effective in creating very useful either Gen AI or non-Gen AI tools.
I think it is a lot about our obligation to learn more about this technology as well, to really do understand what it is doing, how it's doing, what it's doing, and therefore, what its limitations are. And particularly my discipline, copyright law, it makes up legal references all the time. So, I would definitely not use Gen AI right now when it comes to copyright legal research.
Sowmya: I think there's a lot that all of us must learn, with the pace at which technology is growing. That's something that we all have to commit to.
You were just talking about AI tools. I know that Springer Nature recently, you know, you have a tool called Geppetto, and that was something that was donated to the STM Research Integrity Hub. Tell us a little bit more about this tool. Is that something that you were involved in? What is it designed to address?
Leslie: I wasn't really involved in this, but I really think that copyright goes hand-in-hand with research integrity and that copyright is one of the tools in helping to protect the quality of what it is that is published and the author's voice in that.
I was very, very happy to see the initiatives done by Springer Nature in donating the tool that is formally known as Geppetto, the intent of which is to counteract the growth of fraudulent submissions.
AI can make stuff that looks like it could be human, and this has become a huge problem, particular particularly for research academic publishers. This tool really kind of tries to identify fake content and harness pattern recognition tools, which really is what AI is fantastic at. It is amazing at recognizing patterns and then applying that to any particular text. It's free to use for all publishers and hopefully will really help the industry to counteract what seems to be just an avalanche of problems when it comes to research integrity issues, many times amplified—if not created—by AI.
Sowmya: So, let's look ahead. Since most of our listeners are from the publishing industry, what do you think is the one action that publishers and authors can take today in this world of complications with AI and the enhancements that are happening with the copyright and things like that? What would your recommendations be to take some concrete steps?
Leslie: Now, I've always liked the saying, “Start where you are, use what you have and do what you can.” I think that this has usually been a good framework to solving most of my own problems in life and I think that it is a good way of answering this question.
Really, start where you are, understand what content you have, what rights to do you have, what is going on in your own particular market, in your own particular readership, with your own authors, but really understanding exactly where you are, and then kind of doing what you can.
I think one of the biggest things that rights holders can do right now is to take all the steps they can to protect their content. In the EU, we have Article 3 and Article 4 of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, which has what's called text and data mining carve-outs, which allows for text and data mining on content for commercial and non-commercial uses. And if you don't want your content to be text and data mined, you have to opt out. So, you've got to say something either through a hard opt-out on your web page saying, I do not want my text and data mined by these specific tools, or however you decide to express/explain yourself or your policy, or through sticky types of opt-outs which are now currently being developed.
I think that's one of the first steps that you should take and then obviously, it's about moving forward and seeing where you can go. I think it's important not to undervalue the worth of creative works, particularly published works, when it comes to AI uses. We really have the food that AI needs, and AI is only going to develop responsibly and helpfully, if it is developed alongside humans. That means that we are monitoring what goes into it. AI is not being trained on all these pirated websites but really working in tandem and hand-in-hand with the publishing industry in its development. So, things you can do to try to bolster this engagement, I think would also obviously be something that I would advocate for.
Sowmya: And what are you most excited about when you think about the future of publishing rights? What excites you?
Leslie: I think perhaps it's just because you caught me on a Thursday and, you know, tomorrow's Friday... I am in a more positive mood than if you're recording this on a Monday. But I do feel quite positive. I have a deep trust in the copyright system to solve these complicated human problems between people wanting to do things with other people's stuff. This is something that copyright has helped us to navigate before, and I still believe in this.
I think AI technologies really will flourish, and they will allow for new uses of creative content to be disseminated. It will allow people to engage with published content in ways that we probably can't even imagine now. But in 10 years time, they're going to say, yes, of course, that's the way that I read my whatever-it-is through some type of interface, whatever that may be. So, the reason again, that I am involved in copyright is because of my deep love for wanting to fight for creative people in the world.
The possibilities for creativity and technology to really harmonize and amplify each other is something that I think is a real positive right now, something I'm looking forward to.
Sowmya: I think that's a wonderful, positive note to end the podcast because usually we are all worried about what AI can do to publishing, but I hear you. I think there's a lot to be optimistic about because every issue that you think is an issue is actually opening a door for a wonderful set of opportunities that has just not been discovered so far.
Thank you once again, Leslie. It was wonderful to have you on this podcast. I certainly learned a lot. I don't think I've said the word copyright so many times in a short period!
Leslie: Welcome to my world! It is a wonderful place to be. Thank you very much for having me here. It has been really lovely to have a chat with you.
Sowmya: Thank you so much, Leslie.
Explore The Publisherspeak Podcast on Spotify here.
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