Writers, publishers, musicians, photographers, movie producers and newspapers have rejected the Labour government’s plan to create a copyright exemption to help artificial intelligence companies train their algorithms.
In a joint statement, bodies representing thousands of creatives dismissed the proposal made by ministers on Tuesday that would allow companies such as Open AI, Google and Meta to train their AI systems on published works unless their owners actively opt out.
The Creative Rights in AI Coalition (Crac) said existing copyright laws must be respected and enforced rather than degraded.
The coalition includes the British Phonographic Industry, the Independent Society of Musicians, the Motion Picture Association and the Society of Authors as well as Mumsnet, the Guardian, Financial Times, Telegraph, Getty Images, the Daily Mail Group and Newsquest.
Their intervention comes a day after the technology and culture minister Chris Bryant told parliament the proposed system, subject to a 10-week consultation, would “improve access to content by AI developers, whilst allowing rights holders to control how their content is used for AI training”.
Tech UK, an industry lobby group, has called for a “more open” market to enable firms to use copyrighted data and make payments. The Conservative chair of the Commons culture, media and sport select committee, Caroline Dinenage, alleged the government had “fully drunk the Kool-Aid on AI”.
But Bryant told MPs: “If we were to adopt a too tight a regime based on proactive, explicit permission, the danger is that international developers would continue to train their models using UK content accessed overseas, but may not be able to deploy them in the UK … this could significantly disadvantage sectors across our economy, including the creative industries, and sweep the rug from underneath British AI developers.”
The creative industries want the onus to be on generative AI developers to seek permission, agree licences and pay rights holders if they want to train algorithms with the power to write, and make moving images, pictures and music.
The joint statement from the creative industries, shared with the Guardian, said: “Rights holders do not support the new exception to copyright proposed. In fact, rights holders consider that the priority should be to ensure that current copyright laws are respected and enforceable. The only way to guarantee creative control and spur a dynamic licensing – and generative AI – market is for the onus to be on generative AI developers to seek permission and engage with rights holders to agree licences.”
Last week, Paul McCartney and Kate Bush became the latest high-profile British creatives to call for curbs on AI companies engaging in copyright theft. They joined the actors Julianne Moore, Stephen Fry and Hugh Bonneville in signing a petition, now backed by more than 37,500 people, which states the “unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted”.
The novelist Kate Mosse has backed a parallel campaign for amendments to the data bill that would allow the enforcement of the UK’s existing copyright law, thereby allowing creators to negotiate for fair payment when licensing their material.
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In a House of Lords debate on those amendments this week, their proposer, Beeban Kidron, compared the government’s suggested system to asking shopkeepers to “opt out of shoplifters” and said: “I struggle to think of another situation where someone protected by law must proactively wrap it around themselves on an individual basis.”
Clement Jones, the Lib Dem spokesperson on the digital economy, said the government’s proposed copyright exemption was “based on the mistaken idea, promoted by tech lobbyists and echoed in the consultation, that there is a lack of clarity in existing copyright law”.
The science minister, Patrick Vallance, said the government wanted to “support rights-holders to continue to exercise control over the use of their content and their ability to seek remuneration for this” and “support the development of world-leading AI models in the UK by ensuring that access can be appropriately wide”.
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