Creative Industries: Rights Reservation Model

Lord Clement-Jones Excerpts
Thursday 30th January 2025

(1 day, 12 hours ago)

Grand Committee
Read Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Clement-Jones Portrait Lord Clement-Jones (LD)
- Hansard - -

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Foster of Bath on securing the debate today and on his penetrating introduction, which included a number of extremely important questions for the Minister.

AI clearly has many creative uses, as Sir Paul McCartney himself emphasised last Sunday. But it is one thing to use the tech and another to be at the mercy of it, as so many noble Lords emphasised in their thoughtful but passionate speeches, both on Tuesday and today. So many outside organisations—I thank them for their briefings—have also made that very clear in what they have said.

The use of IP-protected content for training is a key issue, which has also arisen in relation to generative AI models outside the UK. It is rather a delicious irony that Open AI is now complaining of its own IP being used to train DeepSeek, as my noble friend said. Here in the UK, the Government’s intentions are clear. The new consultation on AI and copyright, reinforced by the AI opportunities plan, has set out a preferred option—this is the key thing—to change the UK’s copyright framework by creating a text and data mining exception where rights holders have not expressly reserved their rights: in other words, an opt-out system.

We all thought this had been put to bed under the last Government, but this Government seem even more intent on creating a Singapore-on-Thames. In response, we have seen the creation of a new campaign across the creative and news industries, Creative Rights In AI Coalition, and Ed Newton-Rex has raised over 37,000 signatures from creators and creative organisations.

Frankly, the creative and news industries are in uproar. As my noble friend Lord Foster says, the proposals were not underpinned by a robust economic case, but the consultation also starts from the false premise of legal uncertainty. As we heard in the debate on the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on Tuesday, there is no lack of clarity over how AI developers can legally access training data. UK law is clear that commercial organisations, including gen AI developers, must license the data they use to train their large language models. AI developers have already reached agreement with news publishers in a number of cases. Open AI has signed deals with publishers internationally, such as News Corp, Axel Springer, the Atlantic and Reuters. There can be no excuse of market failure. There are well-established licensing solutions administered by a variety of well-established mechanisms and collecting societies.

The consultation says:

“The government believes that the best way to achieve these objectives is through a package of interventions that can balance the needs of the two sectors”.


But what kind of balance is this when it is all take and no give on the part of creatives? The Government have stated that they will move ahead with their preferred “rights reservation” option only if the transparency and rights reservation provisions are

“effective, accessible, and widely adopted”.

However, as we have heard from across the Room today, no effective rights reservation, no system for the use of content by gen AI models, has been proposed or implemented anywhere in the world, which makes the government proposals entirely speculative. The technology does not exist.

The laws around transparency of these activities have not caught up. At present, developers can scrape content from the internet without declaring their identity, or they may use content scraped for one purpose for the completely different commercial purpose of training AI models. How can rights owners opt out of something they do not know about? Once used to train these models, the commercial value has already been extracted from IP scraped without permission, with no way to delete data from these models.

We need transparency and a clear statement about copyright. We absolutely should not expect artists to have to opt out. AI developers must be transparent about the identity and purposes of their crawlers, and have separate crawlers for distinct purposes. Unless news publishers and the broader creative industries can retain control over their data, this will not only reduce investment in creative output but will ultimately harm innovation in the AI sector and, as we have heard, tech developers will lack the high-quality data that is the essential fuel in generative AI.

Retaining the Kidron amendments to address the challenges posed by AI development, particularly in relation to copyright and transparency, is in my view, and that of those on these Benches, essential. This should apply regardless of in which country the scraping of copyright material takes place if developers market their product in the UK. It is clear that AI developers have used their lobbying clout to persuade the Government that a new exemption from copyright in their favour is required. As a result, the Government seem to have gone soft on big tech. In response, my party, creators, the creative industries and many other supporters will be vigorously opposing Government plans for a new text and data-mining exemption.

The Minister has been posed a number of key questions by my noble friend Lord Foster and many others, including the noble Lord, Lord Black of Brentwood. I put another question to him: will he now agree to withdraw the TDM with an opt-out as the preferred solution? That is one of the key requests of the creative industries; they would be dancing in the streets if the Minister said that today.