Copyright and Artificial Intelligence

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Wednesday 18th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

I think my hon. Friend, who is on the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, took advantage of the change in the Chair to get away with asking a question that has absolutely nothing to do with this consultation. On live ticketing, I am absolutely certain that the Government will have something to say soon—the word “soon” means precisely what I choose it to mean.

On publicity rights, my hon. Friend is quite right that that is a significant question that we will ask during the consultation. There is an argument for bringing in legislation in the UK. California, as I said, has a digital replicas law and Tennessee has the ELVIS Act, which stands for eliminating limits on the voice’s intrinsic sovereignty. I think that was an attempt to cram that into the word “Elvis”. She is right that the US Copyright Office is arguing for a federal digital replica law, and we might want to go down that route as well. I urge my hon. Friend and, perhaps, the Select Committee to consider that matter. They might like to provide some advice in response to the consultation as well.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I am tempted to invite the Minister to consult the magnificent Taylor Swift who, apart from all her many other talents, has shown herself pretty shrewd when it comes to preserving the copyright of her material. He puts his finger on the key weakness in all this: no matter what sort of regime we set up, and no matter how many countries we try to get involved in this, surely it will only take one rogue jurisdiction to allow a machine to scrape from everybody else’s material? Then, the internet’s ability for everyone to access it will undermine the regime and, in that way, we face the danger that “Shake It Off” becomes “Rip It Off”.

[Chris Bryant]

I disagree. I saw the right hon. Gentleman nodding earlier when I was talking about not wanting to pull the rug from under the feet of UK AI adopters. The UK is in a very specific position. We have probably the best copyright laws of any country because of the specific way in which they developed. It is partly thanks to Hogarth, Dickens and many others over the years that we have ended up with strong copyright legislation. We also have a strong body of intellectual property in this country, which is enormously valuable, potentially, to AI operators. We stand in a very specific position. There is an argument that AI can be trained elsewhere, in another jurisdiction, but the moment it is brought into the UK, it still falls under UK legislation.

The right hon. Gentleman is also right about this. I did not consult Taylor Swift, but I did ask an AI company to come up with a song in the manner of Adele.

“Oh, I still feel you deep in my soul,

Even though you left me out here on my own.

The love we had it’s slipping through my hands,

But I can’t forget, I still don’t understand.

You’re gone, but your memory’s all I see,

And in the silence, it’s you haunting me”—

Madam Deputy Speaker. [Laughter.] It is sort of Adele, but it is not Adele. Does Adele know that her material has been used? Does her record label know that her lyrics have been used to create that? It is sort of in the territory, but it is not right. I think we can get this right in the UK and provide leadership to the world. That is what we should strive for.

Data Protection and Digital Information (No. 2) Bill

Julian Lewis Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 17th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Julia Lopez]

I thank the hon. Lady for her helpful intervention. She is right: as I said earlier, trust in the system is fundamental to whether citizens have the confidence to share their data and whether we can therefore make use of that data. She made a good point about educating people, and I hope that this debate will mark the start of an important public conversation about how people use data. One of the challenges we face is a complex framework which means that people do not even know how to talk about data, and I think that some of the simplifications we wish to introduce will help us to understand one of the fundamental principles to which we want our new regime to adhere.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

My hon. Friend gave a long list of people who found the rules we had inherited from outside the UK challenging. She might add to that list Members of Parliament themselves. I am sure I am not alone in having been exasperated by being complained about to the Information Commissioner, in this case by a constituent who had written to me complaining about a local parish council. When I shared his letter with the parish council so that it could show how bogus his long-running complaint had been, he proceeded to file a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office because I had shared his phone number—which he had not marked as private—with the parish council, with which he had been in correspondence for several years. The Information Commissioner’s Office took that seriously. This sort of nonsense shows how over-restrictive regulations can be abused by people who are out to stir up trouble unjustifiably.

[Julia Lopez]

Let me gently say that if my right hon. Friend’s constituent was going to pick on one Member of Parliament with whom to raise this point, the Member of Parliament who does not, I understand, use emails would be one of the worst candidates. However, I entirely understand Members’ frustration about the current rules. We are looking into what we can do in relation to democratic engagement, because, as my right hon. Friend says, this is one of the areas in which there is not enough clarity about what can and cannot be done.

We want to reduce burdens on businesses, and above all for the small businesses that account for more than 99% of UK firms. I am pleased that the Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade, my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake), is present to back up those proposals. Businesses that do not have the time, the money or the staff to spend precious hours doing unnecessary form-filling are currently being forced to follow some of the same rules as a billion-dollar technology company. We are therefore cutting the amount of pointless paperwork, ensuring that organisations only have to comply with rules on record-keeping and risk assessment when their processing activities are high-risk. We are getting rid of excessively demanding requirements to appoint data protection officers, giving small businesses much more flexibility when it comes to how they manage data protection risks without procuring external resources.

Those changes will not just make the process simpler, clearer and easier for businesses, they will make it cheaper too. We are expecting micro and small businesses to save nearly £90 million in compliance costs every year: that is £90 million more for higher investment, faster growth and better jobs. According to figures published in 2021, data-driven trade already generates 85% of our services exports. Our new international transfers regime clarifies how we can build data bridges to support the close, free and safe exchange of data with other trusted allies.