Over 400 UK media and arts professionals wrote to the Prime Minister to support an amendment to Data (Use and Access) Bill that promises to give the nation’s creative industry transparency over copyrighted work ingested into AI models.
The list of signatories includes some of the UK’s most famous artists, including musicians Paul McCartney, Elton John and Coldplay, as well as writer/director Richard Curtis. Antony Gormley is also a signatory, along with actor Ian McKellen.
In order to facilitate AI training, the UK government is proposing to allow exceptions from copyright laws for text and data mining. Content producers will have an option to opt out. The letter states that
“Government amendments requiring an economic impact assessment and reports on the feasibility of an ‘opt-out’ copyright regime and transparency requirements do not meet the moment, but simply leave creators open to years of copyright theft,” .
The group, which includes Kate Bush and Robbie Williams as well as Tom Stoppard and Russell T Davies, said that the amendments proposed for the Lords’ debate would require AI firms to inform copyright owners of the individual works they had ingested. The letter states that
“Copyright law is not broken, but you can’t enforce the law if you can’t see the crime taking place. Transparency requirements would make the risk of infringement too great for AI firms to continue to break the law,” .
The amendment was proposed by Baroness Kidron. “How AI is developed and who it benefits are two of the most important questions of our time. The UK creative industries reflect our national stories, drive tourism, create wealth for the nation, and provide 2.4 million jobs across our four nations. They must not be sacrificed to the interests of a handful of US tech companies.”
- US Copyright Office discovered AI companies sometimes violate copyright. Next day, its boss was fired.
- Top Sci-Fi Convention gets a scolding from authors for using AI to screen panelists.
- AI Training License will allow LLM Builders to pay for the content they consume.
- Copyright ignoring AI scraper robots laugh at Robots.txt, so the IETF tries to improve it. Baroness Kidron continued: “The UK is in a unique position to take its place as a global player in the international AI supply chain, but to grasp that opportunity requires the transparency provided for in my amendments, which are essential to create a vibrant licensing market.”
Labour member Lord Brennan of Canton supported the amendment. He said. “Transparency over AI inputs will unlock tremendous economic growth, positioning the UK as the premier market for the burgeoning trade in high-quality AI training data.”
The debate rages on whether AI training should disregard the copyright. The Atlantic, for example, alleges that Metaand other GenAI developers may have accessed copyrighted research papers and books through the LibGen data set. Researchers speculated that OpenAI could have done the exact same thing, with the allegations being part of lawsuits regarding the alleged copyrighted use of material. UK authors were shocked to discover their copyrighted works in the database.
Meanwhile the head of the US Copyright Office was reportedly firedafter the agency concluded AI models’ usage of copyrighted materials went beyond existing doctrines on fair use. (r)
