Artificial Intelligence: Intellectual Property Rights

Debate between George Freeman and Damian Collins

Wednesday 1st February 2023 Westminster Hall

[Damian Collins]

My hon. Friend is right that there are exemptions in other jurisdictions, but none is as wide as the ones that we have set. The most comparable jurisdiction is Singapore. While Singapore has many great qualities, it is not a net exporter of music, nor does it have a creative economy on the same scale as ours. We have been discussing the Intellectual Property Office’s response to a consultation, in which it recommended introducing these measures. Am I right to take from what the Minister said that the Government are now minded not to introduce these measures, and so that for the time being, the status quo prevails until such other proposals may be considered?

[George Freeman]

That is exactly right. I will come to some of the lessons from that in a moment, but I am happy to confirm that.

In the consultation carried out by the Intellectual Property Office, a number of consultees made the case that UK copyright law was too restrictive, and was impeding investment in AI. The point was made about text and data mining exemptions in other countries, but I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe. He has a distinguished record in these affairs as a former Chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, and through his career. The regulations must be proportionate and reflect the economy that we are regulating. We have an incredibly strong digital creative industry and non-digital creative industry, and we must ensure that that is appropriate.

We heard rights holders arguing that no change should be made in the UK, and we also heard not just the big AI and tech firms but researchers in the life sciences and social sciences making the case that many of them were increasingly finding problems, not with negotiating with the obvious rights holders when it was clear who they were, such as universities, but with material available on the internet. They were finding it difficult to find the person to get permission from them, and that was holding back research, especially when working with multiple rights holders. While I am happy to concede that the proposals perhaps were not correctly, fully or properly drafted, there are some issues that are still worth pursuing. The Intellectual Property Office was asking the right questions, but it is more complex than the original proposals suggested. That is why we have committed to continuing that consultation.

Yesterday, I was with the all-party parliamentary group. I have instructed the Intellectual Property Office to share its analysis of the consultation findings, so that we can sit down together and go through what the issues are that we still need to deal with, and can get the balance right. As was said by a number of colleagues from across the House, when I say “get the balance right”, there is clearly a difference between those small and sometimes voiceless creatives—whether analogue or digital, but particularly if they are not in the digital creative economy—because some may want to completely opt out and say, “I just never want to see my image turned into an avatar, ever.” People need the ability to just opt out. People also need the ability to license, to be on the front foot, and to negotiate terms, which happens.

What the Intellectual Property Office picked up on from both sides is that there is a middle ground: there are those without a strong organisational platform through which they can set out the terms on which they are prepared to have their material accessed, and there are digital creators using intermediary AI technologies to create digitally, which is a legitimate activity, and who are struggling to find that interface and make it work. It is in that space that we particularly need to look to get the balance right between our creative, digital and AI sectors. Many in those sectors are small, extraordinarily dynamic and entrepreneurial.

In Coventry, I recently met a fantastic, almost underground coding community of teenagers doing amazing things. We need to be careful to ensure that the creative industry can flourish, and that the rights of the creators, who may or may not want their material to be used, are not trampled over. If they do want their material to be used, that takes us to a second issue: fair remuneration. I have stood here and discussed this with the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) before. There are issues about rights and about remuneration. How should we ensure that small creators are properly remunerated? There are issues that we need to deal with. As a number of colleagues have said, this is about the balance between rights, responsibilities and remuneration in the world of digitalisation of content and creativity.

There are two big lessons from last summer. One is that data is important. I have started a conversation with the Intellectual Property Office to ask if we could not do more to ensure that we have better datasets on exactly what the situation is with new, emerging revenue streams, new providers and new creators. The industry is moving very fast, and when it comes to which bits of the market are working well and which are not, there is a slight lack of data on which to base policy. Creating market conditions in which everyone can have confidence is the real challenge for the Government and for me as Minister.

I tentatively suggest that there may be another lesson, which is that we should harness the power of digital technologies and digitalisation when doing consultations. I am not quite suggesting that we should have run the AI-ometer over the consultation responses, but given the number of analogue Government processes, harnessing smart intelligence systems may provide us with a good way of identifying better clusters of feedback in consultations, and help to democratise the process of consultation. It is a slightly left-field point, but I am trying to signal that as we think about these industries, we have to ensure that we are not just talking to the same people, but driving new methods of consultation to keep up with the pace of the industry.

I have probably detained you, Mr Robertson, and other Members long enough. I hope it is clear that we have listened and heard, and we are absolutely committed to making sure that we get this right. Although the Government need to be on the front foot in anticipating the regulatory framework and getting it right, the proposals have clearly elicited a response that we did not hear when they were being drafted. We have taken the responses seriously. The Minister responsible for this area—my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch and Upminster —and I have made it clear that we do not want to proceed with the original proposals. We will engage seriously, cross-party and with the industry, through the IPO, to ensure that we can, when needed, frame proposals that will command the support required.