NEW YORK, June 26 (Reuters) - OkSeven content-licensing

sellers of music, image, video and other datasets for use in

training artificial intelligence systems have formed the

sector's first trade group, they said on Wednesday.

The Dataset Providers Alliance (DPA) will advocate for

"ethical data sourcing" in the training of AI systems, including

rights for people depicted in datasets and the protection of

content owners' intellectual property rights, the companies said

in a statement.

Founding members include U.S. music dataset company

Rightsify, image licensing service vAIsual, Japanese stock photo

provider Pixta and Germany-based data marketplace Datarade.

The emergence of generative AI technologies that can mimic

human creativity in recent years has triggered an outcry from

content creators and a string of copyright lawsuits against tech

companies like Google, Meta and ChatGPT maker

OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft ( MSFT ).

Developers have been training models by feeding them vast

quantities of content, much of it scraped from the internet for

free without the consent of those who created the works or own

rights to them.

Tech companies, which claim the usage is legal, are also

quietly paying for access to private collections of content both

to fulfill needs for particular types of data and to hedge

against legal and regulatory risks.

The prospect that demand for licensed data will grow if

copyright owners prevail in their legal fights has prompted the

emergence of a nascent industry of companies that package

content and sell access to it for use by AI systems.

As a result, groups have been formed to establish ethical

standards for that trade, like Fairly Trained, a non-profit

founded this year which certifies models that have not used

copyrighted materials without a license.

The DPA targets the content of those transactions,

requiring, for example, that its members agree not to sell text

data obtained by crawling the web or audio that features

people's voices without their explicit consent.

A heavy focus will be to push for legislation like the NO

FAKES Act, a U.S. bill introduced last year to create penalties

for generating unauthorized digital replicas of people's voices

or likenesses, said Alex Bestall, CEO of Rightsify and its

licensing subsidiary GCX, who led the founding of the group.

"Advocacy will be a big part of it because everyone's taken

their positions on AI and copyright, but a lot of these battles

are yet to be solved and it's going to take a while for them to

be," said Bestall.

The DPA also will press for more training data transparency

requirements like those in the European Union's AI Act and a

similar U.S. bill introduced in April, the Generative AI

Copyright Disclosure Act, he added.

The group plans to publish a white paper outlining its

positions in July, he said.