2. Value & Exchange

Value & Exchange covers how creative work and labor are priced, licensed and paid for when AI is part of the process and the marketplace. The organizing question here is how creative labor is valued and compensated when the established compensation mechanisms are under pressure and new ones are not yet set. This system includes licensing of creative work for AI training, damages and settlements in cases involving AI use,  collective and compulsory licensing, labor contracts, platform royalty systems, and market conditions for finished creative work.

For most of the 20th century, compensation for creative work had four main mechanisms:

• Copyright licensing generated royalties when protected work was used.
• Market sales, including retail, box office, subscription and advertising-supported distribution, paid for finished work.
• Collective administration by organizations such as ASCAP, BMI and SoundExchange handled uses too numerous for individual licensing.
• Labor contracts, mostly negotiated by guilds and unions, paid for creative work done in employment.

Our system posits identifies input markets used in some way by AI, and output markets of finished creative work, commissions and creative services, where human-made work now competes with generated output.

Value also takes the components of creative identity identified in Attribution and Accountability and asks how they are reassembled, or recompiled, into units that can be priced and paid for. It tracks four means of doing this:

• Private licensing between rights holders and AI developers.
• Collective licensing administered on behalf of many rights holders, on the model of performing-rights organizations.
• Compulsory licensing by use set by statute, with rates determined by a regulatory process.
• Individual opt-in and opt-out mechanisms that let individual creators grant or withhold permission for AI use of their work or identity.

The system lets a reader identify each development by the market it operates in and the compensation architecture it uses or proposes. It shows which kinds of rights holders are party to which agreements. Actor coding and representation tiers make visible whether a deal was negotiated by an aggregator, a collective body, a union or individual creators. The system also compares how different jurisdictions answer the questions about payment for training data, from opt-out regimes to statutory exceptions to litigation over fair use.

Value and Exchange is the exchange layer, the system that moves compensation across contributions once they have been identified. It depends on the trust layer, because payment requires authorship identity. This in turn shapes conditions tracked in Cultural Infrastructure and Ecology.

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