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Withdrawal and Ongoing Rights

Contributors own their work at every point in the relationship with CORPUS. The licence you grant is for AI training, on the terms you opt in to, and you can stop it for future use at any time. This page describes what withdrawal means in practice, what it does not undo, and how your rights and royalties behave afterwards.

What you keep at all times​

A few things are not contingent on staying in the system:

  • Ownership of your work. CORPUS never takes ownership of recordings, stems, MIDI, or metadata you contribute. The licence is a use grant, not a transfer.
  • The right to license elsewhere. Your contributions to CORPUS do not exclude other licensing arrangements. You can release, distribute, sync, and license your works through any other channel without asking us.
  • The right to withdraw. Withdrawal is available at any time, for any reason, without penalty.

What withdrawal does​

Withdrawal removes a work — or your entire body of contributions, if you choose — from any future training runs. No new model will be trained on the withdrawn material. The work is marked withdrawn in the registry, and the integrity audit log records the change.

You initiate withdrawal in the app. The process is built around the same audit trail that governs every other state change: you act, the system records, the result is visible in your dashboard.

What withdrawal does not undo​

If a work has already been included in a training run, its influence is embedded in the model weights of that run. There is no technical procedure to "untrain" a model — once a contribution has shaped a model, that shaping has happened. CORPUS handles this honestly:

  • The work continues to be royalty-eligible for models it has already trained. Withdrawal stops future training, not past compensation. As long as a model that includes your work generates revenue, your royalty entitlement on that model continues.
  • Already-issued CRPS remain. Participation rights once issued reflect the historical fact of your contribution. Withdrawal does not erase that fact, and it does not erase the rights.

This is a deliberate design decision, and it is one of the places CORPUS most clearly departs from industry norms. On most platforms, once a work is ingested, the contributor loses both control and economic participation. CORPUS keeps compensation flowing for past contributions even when a contributor leaves, because the alternative — withdrawing both the future use and the past compensation — would punish contributors for changing their mind.

Disputes about ownership​

If someone challenges the rights situation around a work you contributed — a co-author who claims a different split, a publisher with an exclusive licence you forgot to disclose, a sample whose source is contested — the work goes into review. During review, your points on the contested track are held in a pending state, but you are not penalised before the process concludes. The dispute resolution path follows the procedures described in Dispute Resolution.

When you do not need to withdraw​

A few situations look like reasons to withdraw but usually have lighter answers:

  • You want to fix metadata or add stems. No withdrawal needed; edit the contribution in the app.
  • You want to pause without leaving. No withdrawal needed; you can simply stop uploading. Existing contributions continue under their existing terms.
  • You disagree with a scoring decision. Use the appeal route in the Action Hub. Withdrawal is a stronger move than appeal and discards the future option of contributing again.

Withdrawal is the right tool when you no longer want your work to be used for new training. For everything else, the lighter mechanisms are usually closer to what you want.