Intellectual Property: Artificial Intelligence

Max Wilkinson Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd April 2025 Westminster Hall

[Max Wilkinson (Cheltenham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms McVey. I congratulate the birthday boy, the hon. Member for Bury North (Mr Frith), on securing this important debate.

In my constituency, we have thriving creative and tech industries off the back of GCHQ—Cheltenham has a lot of creative businesses. When I hosted my roundtable with the creatives, they told me that they are extremely worried about what they assume is being proposed in the Government’s consultation. When I talk to tech start-ups, they say they are also concerned about that because they are worried that the things they are doing to innovate are being scraped. That is a concern from an economic growth perspective, in both directions, and the Government need to acknowledge that.

Intellectual property rights protect human ingenuity. They are the legal and moral foundations that allow creators to share in the value of what they create, but artificial intelligence is blurring the line between human and machine authorship, and is raising urgent and complex questions. Who owns an AI-generated piece of music trained on thousands of copyrighted songs? How do we enforce rights when the inputs and outputs are hidden behind proprietary algorithms? The answer must be that creators own the rights to their work, and those rights must be protected.

For centuries, creators have honed their craft through years of study, practice and transformation. That contributes to what we all enjoy about the creative industries, but AI now allows machines to ingest and remix millions of works in seconds, fundamentally altering the relationship between inspiration and creation. If we talk to tech companies about this, we find that they do not quite grasp the difference between their innovation and that of the human mind. That unprecedented scale and speed demands stronger, not weaker, protections. Our creative industries generate £126 billion annually and are central to our economy and cultural identity. As AI continues to reshape content production, the intellectual property rights of our writers, musicians and artists must be safeguarded, not weakened.

As we argued during the debates on the Data (Use and Access) Bill, when innovation outpaces regulation, we risk losing public trust and undermining the creative industries that employ 2.3 million people across the country. That is bad for our economy. Throughout the debates on data legislation, we have consistently argued that consent must not be an afterthought but should be the default. If a human being has created something, they have the right to know how it is being used and to be fairly recognised and remunerated for that use. That principle must carry through to how we approach AI and intellectual property.

The tech companies claim that an opt-in system would be too technically complex to implement. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? But at its heart, this debate is not about technical feasibility. It is about being willing to respect creators’ rights from the outset, preventing theft, as Members have said, and supporting our valued creative industries. We have also warned against innovation washing: the idea that technical progress should come before ethical scrutiny. It is not anti-innovation to protect creators, but quite the opposite. A fair IP framework is what allows our creativity and innovation to thrive, and it is good for our economy, too.

So what must we do? First, we must ensure that web crawlers and AI models are bound by existing copyright law. That is why the Liberal Democrats have tabled amendments to the Data (Use and Access) Bill that would enforce existing copyright protections, rather than weakening them through a suggested opt-out system. Secondly, we need meaningful transparency. Our amendments would increase data and identity transparency for crawlers and models, ensuring that creators know how and where their work is being used to train AI systems. Thirdly, we need a clear path for consent and compensation. We have seen in the data Bill debates how opaque data-collection practices undermine public confidence. That lesson must apply here. Creators should have the right to opt in or opt out of their work being used in AI training, and there must be mechanisms for meaningful, proportionate compensation.

I also urge the Government to lead internationally on this issue. We have an opportunity to establish stronger protections that better serve our creative sector. The Independent Society of Musicians, the Authors Guild, the British Copyright Council and the Association of Illustrators—to name just a few of the many organisations representing hundreds of thousands of creators—all support that stance. The global nature of AI necessitates co-ordination through the World Intellectual Property Organisation and alignment with international partners, but British creators deserve robust protections that travel with their work across international borders.

This debate has repeatedly shown that, across party lines, we believe that creators must be protected—that is true of those who speak on behalf of the Liberal Democrats, the Government, the Conservatives and the nationalists, and those elsewhere, too. Creators must be at the centre. Data and innovation policy must work for people, not just for platforms, algorithms or corporations. Let us remember that behind every dataset are human stories: the novelist who spent years crafting her narrative; the musician who refined his composition through countless hours of practice; the visual artist whose unique perspective shapes our cultural landscape. Their rights are not obstacles to innovation, but its very foundation.