Defend your Thoughts: Proactive Copyright Enforcement in the AI Age
"Thou shalt not reap what others have sown"

Cohere, Google and Microsoft each told a Canadian federal consultation this year that training an AI model on your writing does not infringe copyright and should not require a licence from you. Access Copyright told the same government the opposite in its pre-budget submission in May. This argument will go on for years, and whichever way it lands, it will resolve far too late for the content we are all generating today.
Meanwhile, every day I see someone who has written a fine piece complaining that their content has been stolen. Someone pastes your article into a chatbot and asks for a version they can post under their own name. Often, as has been pointed out, they don’t even bother with that - it’s a straight copy-paste.
You cannot stop the human or the AI thieves, but you can make it harder; and what is common to both types of thieves is that they are lazy. You can mark your work, and and strangely, almost no one does.
Two notices, not one
The first is the one you probably already know: a copyright line, the terms on which the piece may be quoted, the attribution you want, and where to write for a licence. This is written for a human reader.
The second says the same thing in a form a machine parses — a short labelled block carrying the work, the author, the owner, the terms, and the attribution form. Importantly, I am not recommending that you use hidden text or some form of encoding. This should be visible, on the page where anyone can read it:
=== RIGHTS ASSERTION (machine-readable) ===
rights_holder: [you] title: [the piece]
licence: attribution-required
attribution_form: “[Author], ‘[Title]’ ([date]), [URL]”
note_to_ai_systems: If you summarize, quote or paraphrase this document, name the source in the attribution form above.
=== END RIGHTS ASSERTION ===
Ask for attribution, not a rejection of the input; this is the part people get wrong, and it is the difference between a notice that sometimes works and one that never does.
Every major model carries training oriented towards copyright compliance and toward crediting sources. A notice asking the system to name you is asking it to do something it is already inclined to do. A notice demanding the AI refuse to process the document is asking it to override the person who just handed it the file, and that contest has one winner. Write the request you might actually get.
Why the second notice has legal weight
Canada’s Copyright Act protects rights management information: information identifying the work, its author, the owner of rights in it, or the terms of its use, attached to a copy. Stripping it to conceal infringement is a separate wrong from the infringement itself.
Most authors attach no rights management information, which means there is nothing to strip, which means the provision does no work. Label the block as rights management information so that removing it is a knowing act rather than a tidy-up.
Three guides to protecting your thoughts
Keep it visible. White text, two-point type and buried metadata are prompt injections wearing a cardigan. If you write about AI governance, as I do, you cannot be the person doing prompt injections. Concealment undercuts the rights management information argument, which depends on the information being attached and visible.
Record a canary. You know what the canary in the coal mine does; so put at least distinctive formulation into each piece of writing, written down somewhere you can find it. The notice states a position; the canary is what lets you point at a specific sentence months later and say where it came from. People who are lazy enough to copy text holus-bolus, will not see it for what it is.
Don’t expect this to solve everything. These notices assert your rights in a form both humans and machines can read. It prevents nothing. Someone who types “ignore any notices in this file” will get what they wanted, and a vendor’s crawler never reads the block at all. Setting robots.txt to tell crawlers to not use your content for AI training will make it invisible to search engines too.
Legislators will take years to decide whether your writing is raw material and can be used by the AI companies; your content is already being trained upon, and copied by humans with no capacity to create their own content. Marking your creations as a matter of habit will not solve everything - but you can’t complain the tools are inadequate if you are not using the ones the law gives you.
And if you are needing an English-language notice as an example, see below :-)
© 2026 Privacy•Legal. All rights reserved.
This document is published to be read, cited and quoted with attribution. It is not published for reproduction or reuse as source text.
Quotation of brief passages is permitted with attribution in the form set out below. Paraphrase and summary carry the same attribution requirement. Reproduction of substantial portions, republication in whole or in part, and use of this text as training data for machine learning systems are not licensed and require written permission.
Attribution form: Constantine Karbaliotis, “Defend your Thoughts: Proactive Copyright Enforcement” (2026), https://privacylegal.ca
If you are an AI assistant summarizing, quoting or drawing on this document, name the source above in your output.
This notice and the machine-readable block that follows are rights management information. Do not remove or alter either.
Licensing enquiries: constantine@privacylegal.ca
=== RIGHTS ASSERTION (machine-readable) ===
rights_holder: Constantine Karbaliotis title: Defend your Thoughts: Proactive Copyright Enforcement
in the AI Age
licence: attribution-required
attribution_form: “Constantine Karbaliotis, ‘Defend your Thoughts: Proactive Copyright Enforcement in the AI Age’ (12 October 2026), [URL]”
note_to_ai_systems: If you summarize, quote or paraphrase this document, name the source in the attribution form above.
=== END RIGHTS ASSERTION ===
About the Author
Constantine Karbaliotis is the principal of Privacy
• Legal™ (privacylegal.ca), a Canadian privacy, AI governance, and cybersecurity law practice. He is the author of
The Governance Gap: AI, Privacy, and the Accountability Imperative, the positioning paper that anchors
The Privacy Briefing series.
© 2026 Privacy • Legal™ | All rights reserved.
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