InPublishing: Creative Rights in AI Coalition reacts

Reacting to the release of the government’s consultation on AI and copyright, the Creative Rights in AI Coalition said: “Whilst members are still digesting the details of the consultation, 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. We welcome proposals for transparency measures which will allow rights holders to understand how their work has been used but these should be implemented to make existing copyright law enforceable, rather than being offered as a ‘trade off’ for the degradation of copyright protections.”

Creative Rights in AI Coalition have selected quotes from the debate on 18 December 2024 in The House Of Lords on the Data (Use and Access) Bill, as follows:

Baroness Kidron: “Should shopkeepers have to opt out of shoplifters? Should victims of violence have to opt out of attacks? Should those who use the internet for banking have to opt out of fraud? I could go on. I struggle to think of another situation where someone protected by law must proactively wrap it around themselves on an individual basis.

“The government consultation does not even contain an option of retaining the current copyright framework and making it workable with transparency provisions—the provisions of the amendments in front of us. The Government have sold the creative industries down the river.”

Lord Freyberg: “For months, we have been urged to trust the Government to find the right balance between creators’ rights and AI innovation, yet their concept of balance has now been revealed for what it truly is: an incredibly unfair trade-off that gives away the rights of hundreds of thousands of creators to AI firms in exchange for vague promises of transparency. Their proposal is built on a fundamentally flawed premise—promoted by tech lobbyists—that there is a lack of clarity in existing copyright law. This is completely untrue: the use of copyrighted content by AI companies without a licence is theft on a mass scale, as has already been said, and there is no objective case for the new text and data-mining exception.”

The Earl Clancarty: “A particular sentence in the excellent briefing for this debate by the News Media Association, referred to by my noble friend Lady Kidron, caught my eye: “There is no ‘balance’ to be struck between creators’ copyrights and GAI innovation: IP rights are central to GAI innovation”. This is a crucial point. One might say that data does not grow on a magic data tree. All data originates from somewhere, and that will include data produced creatively. One might also say that such authorship should be seen to precede any interests in use and access. It certainly should not be something tagged on to the end, as an afterthought.”

Viscount Colville: “The real problem is that content producers do not even know when their content has been used. Even the AI companies sometimes do not know what content has been used. Surely, the opt-out measure is like having your house raided and then asking the burglar what he has taken.”

Lord Hampton: “All these [previous technological] changes were evolution and the result of a world becoming more digitised, but AI web crawlers are different, illegally scraping images without consent or payment then potentially killing the trade of the victim by setting up in competition. This is a parasite, but not in the true sense, because a parasite is careful to keep its victims alive.”

Lord Lucas: “If we produce a system where we do not defend the IP that we produce, then fairly rapidly, those IP creators who are capable of being mobile will go elsewhere to places that will defend their IP. It is something that a Government who are interested in growth really ought to be interested in defending.”

Lord Clement-Jones (Lib Dem Frontbench): “[…] the Government’s consultation is 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. This is completely untrue: the use of copyrighted content by gen AI firms without a licence is “theft of copyright on a mass scale”, and there is no objective case for a new text and data mining exception.

“[…]what the Government are proposing is an incredibly unfair trade-off, giving the creative industries a vague commitment to transparency, while giving the rights of hundreds of thousands of creators to gen AI firms. While creators are desperate for a solution after years of copyright theft by gen AI firms, making a crime legal cannot be the solution to mass theft.”

Lord Faulks: “I am extremely concerned about what appears to have been a considerable amount of lobbying by big tech in this area.

“It is extremely important that this so-called balance does not mean that those who create original material protected by the copyright Acts have their rights violated in order to satisfy the interests of big tech.”

Earl of Effingham (Conservative Frontbench): “His Majesty’s Official Opposition are concerned by the already strong concerns from the creative sector, even before consultation has started. Clearly, the opt-out model has not been welcomed.”

Organisations in membership of the Creative Rights in AI Coalition are: