4.1 What NILP covers
Name rights — the right to control commercial use of your name. Includes use in AI-generated advertising, endorsements, or content that implies your association with a product or service without consent.
Image rights — the right to control use of your likeness. AI-generated images of real people engage image rights even where no actual photograph was used.
Voice rights — increasingly recognised as a distinct category. Voice is the most commercially replicable biometric identifier. A voice clone made from recordings engages voice rights, neighbouring rights, and biometric rights simultaneously.
Publicity rights — the right to control the commercial value of your identity. Particularly strong in some US state jurisdictions.
4.2 How AI engages NILP rights — the four pipeline stages
Training data ingestion — AI systems training on images, audio recordings, or biographical data of a specific person. Requires consent from the person, not from any platform that hosted the content.
Fine-tuning — voice model fine-tuning is the most direct NILP engagement in AI. A model fine-tuned specifically to replicate a specific artist's voice requires a NILP Licence.
Inference — generated outputs — when an AI system generates identity content without authorisation, it creates NILP Downstream Obligation liability.
Distribution and commercial use — when AI-generated identity content is published or used commercially, the rights holder has a claim regardless of how many intermediary steps occurred.
4.3 The NILP pipeline licence flow
A NILP Downstream Obligation is the liability that attaches when AI-generated identity content is used commercially without a valid underlying NILP Licence. It travels with the output and can be asserted by the rights holder regardless of intermediaries.
4.4 Minimum NILP protection declaration in cip.md
The seven fields required for minimum NILP protection:
- CIP-NILP-Protected: true
- CIP-NILP-Deepfake: Prohibited
- CIP-NILP-Voice-Clone: Prohibited
- CIP-NILP-Likeness-AI: Prohibited
- CIP-NILP-Commercial-Use: Prohibited-Without-Licence
- CIP-Biometric-Training: Prohibited
- CIP-NILP-Licence-Contact: rights@yourdomain.com
Summary
Key Takeaways
- NILP rights cover name, image, likeness, voice, and publicity
- AI engages NILP at training, fine-tuning, inference, and distribution stages
- The NILP Downstream Obligation travels with AI-generated identity content
- Performers hold both NILP rights and neighbouring rights — both engaged by voice cloning
- The seven-field cip.md NILP declaration is the minimum required protection
Self-check
Check Your Understanding
- What does the acronym NILP stand for in the CIP framework?
- At which AI pipeline stage is voice cloning the most direct NILP engagement?
- What is a NILP Downstream Obligation?
- A voice clone of a performer is created from their recordings. Which rights are simultaneously engaged?
- How many fields does the minimum NILP protection declaration in cip.md require?