Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL]

Baroness Harding of Winscombe Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons
Wednesday 11th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freyberg (CB)]

I support the Motion tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. I declare my interest as an artist member of DACS.

It is no secret that Governments have built AI policy around the views of those with the deepest vested interests: companies whose business models rely on opacity. The noble Lord’s amendment is modest, but it is a line in the sand. If we want a fair digital economy, we must start by listening not only to shareholders and Silicon Valley lobbyists but to creators, researchers and small businesses. Transparency is not a threat to innovation; it is the precondition for accountability.

I will explain the reasons behind that. First, this amendment aligns perfectly with established IP disclosure requirements. Under Regulation 16 of the collective rights management regulations, copyright users must already provide information to collecting societies about works used. The amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, would simply extend this proven principle to AI companies to ensure they disclose what copyright works they use in training. This would create consistency across our IP regime, rather than carve out special exemptions for big tech.

Secondly, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, has already said, the amendment involves no financial burden on the Government.

Finally, disclosures benefit everyone, including AI companies themselves. When both rights holders and AI developers can see what works have been used, they can properly assess whether legitimate exceptions exist under copyright laws and whether they apply. This legal clarity reduces litigation risks and encourages proper licensing arrangements. I hope that the House will support this amendment.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, like many others, I am extremely sad to see that we have reached this stage. Sadly, I was unable to attend the other stages of ping-pong, so I feel that I need to add my support to the extraordinary work that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, has done on the Bill. She has achieved something that, certainly in my short 10 years here, is very rare: real unanimity across all sides of this House that we are engaged in doing something that is very wrong.

I applaud the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. Like my noble friend Lord Forsyth, I too will support him if he chooses to divide the House.

I offer noble Lords one small crumb of comfort. We are united, across all sides of this House, in saying that we need to sort this out. We keep being told that AI will change everything, which, I am afraid, means that we will discuss this during debates on every Bill. There will be an opportunity to do that, and we will prevail in the end. This House has faced these dilemmas with technology transformation before, and I am determined that I will not, in my lifetime, participate in the protection of an industry in the name of economic growth, when what we are actually doing is destroying society and people’s lives.

It is very sad that it took 100 years for seat belts to become mandatory in the back seats of cars after the seat belt was invented. I feel confident that after the passage of the Bill, it will not take that long for us to protect the precious copyright of the British creative industries. We will keep fighting even if we lose.

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, there is another little problem, pointed out to me by a senior member of a publishing company, World Wide Publishing. It has a lot of research material and things for students, as well as books and things such as that. At the moment, if the AI comes to take it, it is probably going to use the fair use or the small excerpt exception, because that protects it. When it falls back, it is quite possible that the copyright holders could have a claim against the publishers. If they start ganging together and going for the publishers, we are possibly going to see bankruptcies among some of the big publishers, that publish and hold all our research material that is so valuable. I am not thinking about the arts thing as much, but we need to worry about that because that could destroy a lot of useful information for our future.