Glossary
Chain of title
The documented trail showing who owned a piece of material and what rights transferred at each step, used to prove a dataset can be lawfully licensed for AI training.
In practice it is a document set: employment and contractor agreements with assignment language, work-made-for-hire terms, guest and participant releases, licences for any music or third-party clips, and records of any transfers between companies. A gap at any link — an editor who never signed, a guest with no release — clouds everything downstream. Buyers review chain of title during diligence, and the licence’s warranties typically stand behind it.
Why it matters
A complete chain is often the difference between an archive that licenses quickly and one that stalls in legal review.