Generative AI: Intellectual Property Rights

Lord Markham Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

That is exactly what we are trying to achieve. Creatives need to be properly respected and rewarded for their activities. We need to make sure that when scraping and web-crawling takes place, there is transparency about that and the originators of the material are properly recognised and rewarded.

[Lord Markham (Con)]

My Lords, as the Minister knows, AI model training and associated copyright infringement can occur anywhere in the world, effectively offshoring copyright infringement. So while we welcome the Minister for AI’s statement that the Government will end uncertainty around the use of copyright content for AI, I am afraid I have another tricky question to add. How do we intend to do that in the space of protecting UK content from international offshoring?

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

The noble Lord is quite right: not only is our material used internationally, but UK-based AI sites are using internationally created material. So this is an international problem—we cannot resolve it just within the UK. We are working closely with international partners, and it is a shared priority for Governments across the world. The Intellectual Property Office is engaging with international partners and other offices, including the World Intellectual Property Organization, to try to advance discussions on this issue. As the noble Lord said, it is an important international issue. We cannot resolve it on our own.