INSIDE THIS AI SKILL
The craft behind its decisions.
These are the principles and procedures the skill applies. You can understand the reasoning without having to perform every production task yourself.
The expensive right is never the one you knew about.
It is the melody someone cleared for one platform, in one territory, for one year, and nobody wrote down which - discovered by a buyer doing diligence on a finished season.
01 / Rights clearance
The questions, in order
- 01Who owns the underlying story
And can they prove it. An adaptation of your own web serial still needs the visual adaptation rights separated from the text rights, which is where this most often falls over.
- 02What exactly was granted
Production, publication, derivative works, paid promotion, sublicensing. A grant covering one of these does not cover the rest.
- 03Where, and on what
Territory and platform. A track cleared for one country constrains a market variant, and constrains it as a fact rather than as a preference.
- 04For how long
Start and end. Record the expiry as a date in a system, not as a memory.
- 05In which languages
Whether the grant covers dubbed, subtitled or otherwise adapted versions. A blocked track should block a track, not a season.
- 06May it be used as a model reference
Some grants say no. If the answer is no, the router has to know before it dispatches, because a reference flows into everything that inherits it.
- 07Whose face and whose voice
Verified permission, with territory and term, or the answer is no. There is no version of this question that gets waived.
- 08What has to be credited or disclosed
Attribution obligations and synthetic-media disclosure, both of which attach to the deliverable and are checked at delivery.
02 / Rights clearance
The traps specific to this market
- A folk melody everyone knows, in a specific arrangement someone owns
- A translation or retelling of a public-domain story, itself copyrighted
- A regional variant with a documented author nobody thought to check
- A film adaptation's plot inventions, which belong to that film
- An illustration style associated with a publisher
- A spokesperson permission that expired between campaigns
- A reference image built from someone else's production
03 / Rights clearance
What this is not
Questions about this skill
What does the AI Rights Skill handle automatically?
It organises source-asset information, permission records and usage requirements, then highlights missing evidence and the work affected by it. This makes the checklist easier to follow without making the AI Director a rights holder or legal adviser. Actual grants and clearance decisions must come from the appropriate people.
What is a blocking right?
Anything whose absence would make delivery unlawful or a breach of the grant: missing ownership of a source, an expired term, a territory the deliverable is going to that the grant does not cover, a model restriction on a reference, or a required disclosure that has not been applied.
Can I start producing while a right is unresolved?
Work that does not depend on the unresolved asset can proceed. Work that does is blocked, and delivery of anything depending on it is blocked. Treating rights per asset and per track is what keeps one open question from stopping a season.
Does Tosheo clear rights for me?
No. We record, check and enforce the positions you supply, and we will stop the line when one is missing. Clearing is yours, with your own legal advice.
What about music?
It is the most common failure and worth its own pass. Composition and recording are separate rights, a sync licence is separate from a master licence, and most regional catalogue positions are bounded by territory and term in ways that are not obvious from the agreement everyone remembers.
What if I only find out at delivery?
Then you are choosing between delaying the handover, replacing the asset and re-cutting, or shipping something you should not. All three are expensive, which is the entire argument for running this checklist first.