Music educators work in environments filled with intellectual property. On a typical day, they deal with copyrighted sheet music, consider needed licenses for sharing their groups' performances, and may even seek ways to educate students to be critical consumers and creators of media. Artificial intelligence then further complicates an already challenging and confusing creative rights landscape (Thibeault, 2012a). AI represents a disruptive force in how music is made, shared, and purchased. Consequently, music educators will need to adapt their practices through the disruption. As the creative power of AI brings with it challenges related to authorship, ownership, copyrightability, and tensions regarding the works that might inform AI products, we suggest that an orientation to creative rights and critical literacies (O'Leary, 2025; Pangrazio & Selwyn, 2023) can guide music educators' work with copyright and intellectual property. Past adaptations to new technologies can be instructive, considering that over the last three decades evolving media consumption practices have shaped how copyright is understood and enforced in creative work (Cunningham & Craig, 2021). This paper examines how copyright has evolved through major policy and legal changes and the impacts those changes have had on music educators' work. It begins with an exploration of the all rights reserved copyright licenses and moves to new frameworks for licensing the use of intellectual property like Creative Commons (Lessig, 2008). It then features a discussion of how new media and participatory culture (Jenkins, 2003, 2006; Tobias, 2013) have brought about issues with corporate platformized copyright enforcement and evolving creative practices (Grey, 2020; O'Leary, 2023; Poell et al., 2022), leading to an exploration of how AI might amplify and extend evolving intellectual property trends. Using a creative rights, as opposed to compliance, orientation (Thibeault, 2012b) copyright issues are framed through challenges that music educators encounter in their work, including how the prevailing view of copyright as a set of rules to comply with may prevent music teachers and learners from engaging in rich and compelling discussions about creative rights. The paper concludes by offering a creative rights and critical literacies framework to support curricular engagements where students consider the authorship implications of their use of AI in creative work, how they might perceive their creative work being used to train AI models, and ways to deepen music educators' and students' understandings of copyright, intellectual property, and how they interact with AI.