Copyright: UK wants to release protected works for AI training

Writers, film producers, musicians, photographers and press publishers are up in arms against the British government's plan to create a copyright exception in favor of the artificial intelligence (AI) industry. London wants to make it easier for OpenAI, Google, Meta & Co. to train their language models with a barrier regulation. Creative minds and rights holders would first have to actively object in order to prevent protected works from being gutted. Such an opt-out procedure is the wrong approach, emphasizes the Creative Rights in AI Coalition. The priority must be to comply with and enforce copyright laws. Developers of generative AI should be obliged to obtain permissions and licenses.

The Guardian, which is a member of the coalition as well as associations of the British music industry and independent composers, the Motion Picture Association and the Society of Authors as well as media companies such as the Financial Times, Telegraph, Getty Images and the Daily Mail Group, quotes from the statement. Ahead of the consultation launched on Tuesday, with the government seeking views on its proposal until February 25, the alliance said: "The UK's world-leading creative and tech industries put the country in a unique position to set a global standard for how both can innovate together and continue to deliver high quality services." Protecting copyright and building a dynamic licensing market for the use of creative content in building generative AI is therefore "not just a question of fairness", but also of both sectors thriving.

House of Lords member: creative industry open to plunder

Last week, Paul McCartney and Kate Bush became the latest prominent British creatives to call for AI companies that infringe copyright to be stopped. Together with actors such as Julianne Moore, Stephen Fry and Hugh Bonneville, they signed a petition that has already been supported by over 37,500 people. According to the petition, "the unlicensed use of creative works to train generative AI poses a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind these works". During a debate in the House of Lords, director and producer Beeban Kidron, a member of the House of Lords, compared the outlined system to introducing an opt-out against shoplifters for store owners only.

Ultimately, according to Kidron, the government is considering giving away the livelihood of the British creative sector, which is worth 126 billion pounds a year. UK Technology and Culture Minister Chris Bryant countered in Parliament that the system would "improve access to content for AI developers". At the same time, rights holders would be able to control "how their content is used for AI training". An opt-in regime would risk "international developers continuing to train their models with UK content accessed abroad, but then possibly not being able to use it in the UK". This is also likely to disadvantage the creative industry and "pull the rug out from under UK AI developers". The industry association Tech UK is calling for a more open market to enable companies to use and pay for protected data. A debate is also raging in this country. According to a study for the Copyright Initiative , the reproduction of works using models for generative AI constitutes copyright-relevant reproduction and is illegal. The training of such systems would therefore not fall under the text and data mining barrier.

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