Precursor VenturesA classic pre-seed and seed stage venture capital firm

How should companies navigate tech and copyright clashes?

14 Sept 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:07

A short conversation from Precursor Ventures advising founders building creative/artistic applications about prioritizing strategies for engaging with copyright and rights holders. It contrasts historical industry responses (e.g., ElevenLabs) and sketches engagement strategies (forceful growth like Napster vs. cooperative licensing like Spotify), warning that the space is fraught and evolving.

Chapters

If you're a founder building at the application layer in the creative or artistic space, especially where copyright might come into play, what should you be prioritizing right now if you have control?
I think it's really interesting if you look at the history of even 11 labs, they kind of bumped their toe, I guess is the best way to describe it, with the sort of the Hollywood copyright universe. That's a set of folks who have pretty successfully battled almost every technology wave and managed to extract something of value from for the content that they have. And there was a period of time where I think people thought, gee, maybe what Elevenlabs? Maybe that stubbing their toe will be the end of that company. And it's very much not been the case. And so I think if you're going to be in the creative field, I think you have to have a plan for how are you going to engage with rights holders and license holders. And in some cases there's the Napster strategy, which is you try to get big enough and force them to deal with you on your terms. That can be tough. There can be the Spotify strategy, which is you engage with them small, sort of on their own terms, but try to make the deal work for you as well. But you kind of acknowledge where they're coming from. There's a bunch of different models here, but I think this is going to be highly fraught and some of these things go away.