Creative Industries: Rights Reservation Model

Lord Black of Brentwood Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Black of Brentwood (Con)]

My Lords, I want to address the impact of the Government’s proposed rights reservation model on the media. I declare my interest as deputy chairman of the Telegraph Media Group and note my other interests in the register. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, on securing this debate and on his powerful speech. Hard on the heels of Tuesday’s vote on the data Bill, it presents another opportunity to send a powerful signal that the Government’s preferred option for an opt-out model is deeply flawed and would profoundly damage the whole creative economy.

The crushing onslaught of digital media has impacted every aspect of life but nowhere more acutely than on the media, as advertising revenues, which support quality journalism, have haemorrhaged to the giant, unaccountable tech platforms. The UK’s advertising market was worth more than £36 billion in 2023, but £14 billion of that went direct to Google’s search service alone. By contrast, less than 4% of the value of the entire ad market—yes, 4%—went to news publishers. Media businesses have therefore been in a race against time to find a new business model, but just when many are so successfully doing so, the exponential growth of AI has brought huge new challenges with it, and this proposal will turbocharge that.

The reality of the current media landscape was set out recently by the Economist, which noted that social media had transformed the market by reducing the cost of the distribution of news to zero, and now AI is going to do the same by potentially reducing the cost of generating so-called news to zero. Between the two of them, we are being led into TS Eliot’s “wilderness of mirrors”, where it is impossible to tell the difference between truth and illusion, with profound ramifications for our democracy.

In some ways, it is impossible to reach conclusions about the Government’s opt-out model, as we know so little about it. There has been no impact assessment, and there must be. It is entirely untested and unevidenced, and we cannot learn from other jurisdictions because a working rights reservation regime does not exist anywhere else on the planet. Given the enormous repercussions of this, there must be clarity—and none exists, but of some things we can be certain.

One is that were it even possible to produce a practical and effective opt-out mechanism, and I have severe doubts about that, it would place an immense administrative burden and therefore unsustainable cost on even the largest news publishers. Already, more than 40% of the top 100 English-language news websites do not block any AI crawlers, and they are the ones that have the knowledge and resources to do so. Smaller news publishers, including hard-pressed local media or a freelancer writing on their Substack, simply would not stand a chance. One other point on which we can be certain is that while these proposals may seem attractive to big tech in the short term, over the long term they could end up significantly weakening AI and, as the noble Lord said, we are all pro AI. It has enormous potential but it must be done and dealt with properly.

The problems for AI will spring because it is totally reliant on large volumes of high-quality data. It needs a sustainable and fresh supply to function—something that is especially true for search engines such as Google’s AI Overviews, which rely on retrieval-augmented generation and feed off up-to-date news content to provide accurate, relevant information. Yet researchers predict that, if current trends continue, AI developers will deplete the available stock of public, human-created text data sometime between 2026 and 2032. It will inevitably be replaced by what? By AI-generated content—in other words, it will feed off itself in a way which will degrade the quality of large language models, as they begin to rely on their own inferior data. It would become a modern-day version of the fabled Greek king Erysichthon, whose hunger—forced on him by the goddess Demeter, I am told—was so insatiable that he squandered his entire fortune and ended up eating himself. That is what could happen with AI.

It need not be like this. There is a way forward that will allow both AI and the original content creators to flourish together: simply by ensuring that the existing copyright laws we have are properly and transparently enforced, with effective mechanisms to build a dynamic licensing market. This would be in the interests not just of content creators, who are so desperate for change after years of copyright theft by the GAI firms; of the public, who overwhelmingly believe that these companies should pay to use the content that trains them; or of the media, whose quality journalism is absolutely vital for our democracy. It would, as I have said, be in the long-term interests of AI, too. If the Government really want to make the UK an AI powerhouse and protect our creative industries, which are the envy of the world and will power growth in future, they must think again. I look forward to hearing from the Minister.