Copyright and Artificial Intelligence
Nusrat Ghani Excerpts(2 days, 20 hours ago)
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The Minister for Creative Industries, Arts and Tourism (Chris Bryant)
And now for something completely different! With permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will make a statement regarding our launch of a public consultation on copyright and artificial intelligence.
The United Kingdom has a proud tradition of creativity and technical innovation. From our film and television sectors to video games, publishing, music, design and fashion, our creative industries are a cornerstone of our economy and our creative identity. They bring £125 billion to the economy and employ over 2.3 million people. James Bond, the Beatles, Vivienne Westwood, Adele, “Vera”, Bridget Riley, “Tomb Raider”, the Sugababes, “Football Manager”, Paddington and Paul Smith are all part of an immensely valuable British industry.
The creative industries are central to our economic future, and we are determined to help them flourish. The same is true of artificial intelligence—both as an enabler of other industries, including the creative industries, and as a sector in its own right. The Government are determined to capitalise on the UK’s position of strength in the global AI sector and will soon publish the AI opportunities action plan, which will set out an ambitious road map to unlock AI’s transformative potential across our economy and public services.
Both the creative industries and AI sectors are at the heart of our industrial strategy, and they are also increasingly interlinked. AI is already being used across the creative industries, from music and film production to publishing, architecture and design; it has transformed post-production, for instance. As of September 2024, more than 38% of creative industries businesses said that they have used AI technologies, with nearly 50% using AI to improve their business operations.
Strong copyright laws have been the bedrock of the creative industries, but as things stand, the application of UK copyright law to the training of AI models is fiercely disputed. Rights holders, including musicians, record labels, artists and news publishers, are finding it difficult to control the use of their works to train AI models, and they want and need a greater ability to manage such activity and to be paid for it. Likewise, AI developers, including UK-based start-ups, are finding it difficult to navigate copyright law and complain that the legal uncertainty means that they are unable to train leading models in the UK.
The status quo cannot continue. It risks limiting investment, innovation and growth in the creative industries, the AI sector and the wider economy. Neither side can afford to wait for expensive litigation—either here or in the US—to clarify the law, not least because courts in different jurisdictions may come to different conclusions and individual cases may not provide clarity across the sector. Nor can we simply rely on voluntary co-operation. That is why we think the Government must take proactive and thoughtful action that works for all parties.
The consultation published yesterday sets out clearly that the Government’s objectives on this issue are threefold: to enhance rights holders’ control of their material and their ability to be paid for its use, to support wide access to high-quality material to drive the development of leading AI models in the UK, and to secure greater transparency from AI developers in order to build trust with creators, creative industries and consumers. In short, we want to provide legal certainty for all and to secure enhanced licensing of content.
There are three key aspects to our consultation. The first is increased transparency from AI developers. That includes the content that they have used in training their large language models, how they acquire it, and any content generated by their models. In other words, consumers should know whether a book or song has been generated by a person or by artificial intelligence, and whose content helped generate it in the first place. The second aspect is a new system of rights reservation, whereby rights holders can withhold their content from being used unless and until it has been licensed. The third is an exception to copyright law for text and data mining where rights holders have licensed their content or otherwise chosen not to reserve their rights. That would improve access to content by AI developers, while allowing rights holders to control how their content is used for AI training.
Those measures are contingent upon each other. Progressed together, we believe this package of measures could enhance the ability of rights holders to protect their material and seek payment for its use through increased licensing, while also enabling AI developers to train leading models in the UK in full compliance with UK law. It will, however, only work if there is a proper system of rights reservation in place. I urge everyone to read and respond to the consultation document and to examine the safeguards we are proposing for rights holders. I would especially urge both AI developers and rights holders to work with us to identify a simple, practical, proportionate and effective technical system of rights reservation, without which the whole package will not work.
We are conscious that the UK does not operate in a hermetically sealed bubble, and this provides its own challenges. If we were to adopt a too tight regime based on proactive explicit permission, the danger is that international developers would continue to train their models using UK content accessed overseas but may not be able to deploy them in the UK. As AI becomes increasingly powerful and widely adopted globally, this could significantly disadvantage sectors across our economy, including the creative industries, and sweep the rug from underneath British AI developers. That is why, as well taking this approach in the UK, we are committed to international engagement and recognise the importance of international alignment.
This consultation is a joint effort between the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Intellectual Property Office, and between the Under-Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, my wonderful hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Feryal Clark), who has responsibility for AI, and me, with responsibility for the creative industries.
This is not an academic exercise. The consultation is absolutely clear that we will not implement these changes unless and until we are confident that we have a practical, practicable and effective plan that meets our objectives of enhancing rights holder control, providing legal certainty around AI firms’ access to content, and providing transparency for rights holders and AI developers of all sizes. My fellow Minister and I will be engaging directly with a wide range of people in an attempt to find practical and technical solutions to this question.
Many people have called this an existential question for our creative industries. They are right. We therefore see this consultation as a pivotal opportunity to ensure that sustained growth and innovation for the UK’s AI sector continues to benefit creators, businesses and consumers alike while preserving the values and principles that make our creative industries so unique. We believe that there is a potential win-win solution, and that the UK, with its strong traditions of copyright and technological innovation, is in a unique place to deliver it. I commend this statement to the House.
Dr Ben Spencer (Runnymede and Weybridge) (Con)
I thank the Minister for advance sight of the statement.
Britain is a world leader in the creative industries, from music to art to literature to our free and independent media. I say as a shadow Science, Innovation and Technology Minister that, while we need science to live, the arts make life worth living. The UK also has a world leading tech sector. The invention of generative artificial intelligence provides many opportunities, but particularly for the creative industries the data mining behind AI models can breach copyright. That presents challenges around authenticity when they are used to mimic artists and creative works, and there is a lack of legal clarity around the status of computer-generated work. We must tackle and respond to those issues.
Britain’s creative industries employ nearly 2.4 million people and contribute £125 billion to our economy, but we must also recognise that we are part of a global technological ecosystem and if we fall behind in supporting our artificial intelligence industry it will move elsewhere. Let us be clear: the genie is out of the bottle and the world is scrabbling to respond to it. As always there is a balance to be struck to ensure we take the opportunity on offer to revolutionise working practices and to deliver productivity through technological innovation, so we welcome work and investigation in this area on both the role of regulation and the options available.
Given the delays in the Minister bringing this work forward, he must recognise that this is a complex area to regulate, especially given the international and domestic interconnectivities. Sadly, rather than taking an open position as an honest broker, it is clear today that the Government have already picked one side in this debate. The Minister’s preference for a data mining opt-out for the creative industries will place extra burdens on creators to protect their intellectual property. Given the magnitude of the impact of his proposals, why has he released this consultation now, just before the Christmas break, and why is it limited to only 10 weeks? So when I am benefiting from UK creative talent over the Christmas period, whether listening to the Sugababes or watching Daniel Craig as James Bond—Bond was blond—the creative sector will be responding to a consultation that the livelihoods of those who work in the sector depend on. Will the Minister extend the consultation? Can the Minister explain how the opt-out will ensure protection to creators? And in forming this position, how many times has he already met representatives from the technology and creative sectors both domestically and internationally?
The Minister should be well aware, following five months of falling business confidence, that one thing that businesses dislike is uncertainty, but this announcement of an opt-out represents nothing but uncertainty for the creative industries. Rather than prioritising their need to be seen to be doing something, the Government need to start learning to do things right.
Chris Bryant
Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker.
Fortunately, I asked ChatGPT what the shadow Minister would ask me and it was pretty much right—although some of the questions from ChatGPT were rather more to the point. I will deal with the serious points he made.
First, the shadow Minister raised the point about mimicking artists. That is one of the things we are consulting on. There is a legitimate question about whether we should take further action in this country. Tennessee has acted: it has got its ELVIS Act—the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act. California and a couple of other states in the United States of America have acted on this already, and whether we should move in that direction is a perfectly legitimate question.
Likewise, the shadow Minister referred to computer-generated works. He will probably know that under section 9(3) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 there is provision that seems to guarantee the right for computer-generated art to be copyright-protected. That is not the case in most other countries, and it could be argued that developments in recent copyright law on the nature of originality would suggest that, unless a human being is directly involved in the creation of the work, there should not be copyright protection. We have suggested a direction of travel to get rid of section 9(3) of the Act.
The shadow Minister said that we have delayed bringing this forward, but I merely point out that for quite a long time the previous Government said that they would bring forward a voluntary system, bringing the two sides together. Nothing whatsoever came from that, so I am afraid that feels a bit of a cheat.
What I want to contest is the idea that we have sided with one or the other. There is a legitimate problem, which is that AI companies and the creative industries are at loggerheads in the courts in several different jurisdictions on several different points which are moot at the moment. We do not think that simply standing by the present situation will suffice because the danger is that in two or three years’ time all UK content will have been scraped by one or other AI developing company somewhere else in the world if there is no legal clarity in the UK. I would like to be able to bring all that home so that AI operators can work in this country with security under the law, using UK copyright that has been licensed and paid for, because that is another potential revenue stream for creators in this country.
The shadow Minister asks about extending the consultation. I am not going to extend the consultation. We want to crack on with this piece of work. Only two minutes earlier in his speech he said that we were delaying bringing it forward and then he said we should delay further. It is time that we seize hold of this. I certainly will meet with a large number of people. My fellow Minister my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North and I have met many different organisations and we will be providing a list because it will be in our transparency returns published soon, and the number must run to dozens if not hundreds. Of course, there are differing views, but I make it absolutely clear that the three measures we are talking about—the transparency on inputs and outputs that AI developers will have to provide, the provisions for creators to reserve their rights, and the exemption for data mining for commercial purposes—are contingent upon each other. We will not move forward with such a package unless there is a technical solution to the question of how people can reserve their rights.
At the weekend, I looked online to see what it would be like to try to reserve rights, by pretending to be various musicians and artists. At present, it is phenomenally difficult and complicated—other Members may have questions about this—and that must change. There must be a proper rights reservation system that is easy to use, practicable and enables creators, either individually or collectively, to assert and maintain control of their rights.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
I call the Chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee.
Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West) (Lab)
The UK is in a unique position—second in the world in the creative industries, and in the top three for AI innovation—so getting the right solution to protect and support our intellectual property, while supporting and incentivising AI innovation, is uniquely important to our cultural and economic life.
I am a former regulator and chartered engineer, so I welcome the Minister’s decision to go with regulatory technology as the solution, and to challenge the tech sector to come up with technology to ensure we can have both the reservation of rights and the transparency of inputs to large language models, both of which are critical.
The tech sector too often spends less time protecting people and property than maximising profit, but the language of the consultation is a bit vague. The Minister talked about arriving at a plan rather than a solution, so will he make it absolutely clear that any text and data mining exemption is contingent on the technology being deliverable, implementable and workable, and that if the technology fails, the exemption fails?
Chris Bryant
I welcome the Chair of the Select Committee to her place. She is 100% right that we cannot have the text and data mining exemption for commercial purposes unless there is a proper rights reservation system in place. I do not know whether she has looked at rights reservation, but it is terribly complicated. People can use the robots exclusion protocol, but it is rather out of date and is avoided by many players in the market. It is very complicated and applies only to a person’s own website, whereas their creative input might not be on their personal website—it might be on somebody else’s.
I tried to create a Bridget Riley using an AI bot over the weekend. The bot had obviously trained itself on some Bridget Riley works, but it was a shockingly bad Bridget Riley—it was nowhere near. I wanted to ask whether it had used Bridget Riley’s work to learn how to make a Bridget Riley-like picture and, if so, whether Bridget Riley received any compensation. Bridget Riley could use another website, haveibeentrained.com, if she wanted, but it is phenomenally complicated. That is precisely what must change. The AI companies must come up with a technical solution, whether they produce music, text or whatever. Without that, we will not be able to progress.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
It is always easier if the Minister looks at the Chair, so we can ensure that we are sticking to time limits.
I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.
Victoria Collins (Harpenden and Berkhamsted) (LD)
The UK can and should be a global leader in AI innovation, and I welcome this consultation. Investment and support for technological innovation will be a crucial pillar of growing our economy and solving the problems of today and tomorrow. Likewise, our world-leading creative industries must remain a growth priority.
In my constituency, I see the invaluable contribution that the film industry makes to the local and national economy, driving growth while producing top-quality content. We might not have James Bond, but we have had “Robin Hood” and “Deadpool”, and “Wicked” was recently filmed just over the border.
The creative industries have been clear that failure to apply existing copyright laws to AI model training presents an existential threat. They are being asked to allow their output to be used to train models that could be in direct competition with them. We must get this balance right.
There is no uncertainty in existing law. UK law is totally clear that commercial organisations must license the data they use to train their large language models. The announcement that the Government favour a text and data mining exemption will be deeply concerning to the creative industries. The issue was thought to be settled under the previous Government, so what assessment have the Government made of the likely impact of their favoured option on the creative industries? The expectation seems to be that small businesses in the creative industry should welcome an opt-out system in exchange for vague commitments to transparency, so will the Minister lay out what successful, workable examples of an opt-out system he has looked at? Can he give us examples of where this approach has successfully protected creatives? Why has the option of an opt-in not been included in the consultation?
As has been said previously, the creative industry adds £125 billion a year in gross value to the economy and goes hand in hand with our digital economy. It is essential that the Government support AI innovation, but that cannot come at the cost of our world-leading creative industry.
Dynamic Ticket Pricing
Nusrat Ghani Excerpts(3 months, 1 week ago)
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Dame Caroline Dinenage
I am very fortunate to have been re-elected as the Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, but we do not have any members of the Committee yet. Any decisions about what the Committee will look at will very much be a group decision jointly taken, but this is certainly something I will be putting forward. I know the Minister has already announced some consultation of his own.
To return to dynamic pricing and the laws of supply and demand, mentioned by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), this is something that is used across different marketplaces. Uber employs a smart dynamic pricing mechanism that adjusts the cost of journeys in line with changing variables, such as traffic and current rider-to-driver demand. Hotels and airlines are another market that uses dynamic pricing, but they are very different. If people are stuck at Waterloo station, as I sometimes am, an Uber is not the only option of travel and, when people go on holiday, multiple airlines offer flights to the same city and different hotel options, but when it comes to live music, particularly in cases such as this one, there is one artist and one opportunity to buy a ticket.
The imperfections of the dynamic pricing mechanism were obvious to anybody who attempted to buy a ticket on this occasion, but whatever the rights and wrongs of its suitability for music ticketing and this market place, the most important issue is that fans were not warned about the use of dynamic pricing before they entered the digital queue. Those are the faults that led the Competition and Markets Authority to open its investigation into this debacle. It meant that people had no idea how much a ticket would cost when they logged in. Many fans ended up paying at least double the original listing price of £148, so four standing tickets could cost an eye-watering £1,400 once service and order processing fees were included. The CMA says that it will investigate whether fans were given “clear and timely information”.
Any free market economist would call this a classic case of information asymmetry. There was certainly a lack of clarity over how high ticket prices might eventually go, with the additional chaos of a time limit putting pressure on fans to make an imminent decision about whether they were going to buy.
Ticketmaster claims that the dynamic pricing mechanism is the best way to deter ticket touts, the logic being that any tout buying tickets in bulk would increase demand and therefore see his or her prices and margins slashed. The Guardian has already said that secondary ticketing platforms are advertising more than 4,500 tickets for this tour already, including from one tout who claims to have at least 33 tickets for Cardiff, Wembley and Murrayfield listed, for a combined price of over £26,000.
I am glad that this summer the Government announced a consultation on the secondary ticketing market, where tickets are sold in bulk by touts who often use bots to scout for tickets at face value and sell them well beyond the market value, but will the Minister set out the parameters and timescales for the work? When will it happen and what is it likely to include? He has now announced that the investigation will be widened to consider dynamic pricing and what happened in the Oasis situation, so can we have a reassurance that the eye will not be taken off the ball of the original consultation that he announced in the summer?
There are so many aspects at play. This method of resale is also the culprit for a large amount of money lost to fraud, with Lloyd’s estimating that £1 million was lost to scammers during Taylor Swift’s Eras tour alone. Will the Minister tell me whether the secondary market consultation will include conversations with digital search engines that are signposting customers into the hands of touts and not doing enough to get them direct to principal sales sites?
There is scope for an entire primary market review and for ticketing to be reviewed on a much wider scale. The Oasis episode has opened the eyes of fans to potential anti-competitiveness within the industry. As complaints about the ticketing process began to flood in, Oasis said it was their management and promoters who had agreed a dynamic pricing strategy with Ticketmaster. But, of course, their three tour promoters all have links to Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company and, in effect, they are all the same party. So that party is making money hand over fist through the system, which keeps everything under the Live Nation umbrella.
For a typical tour, a Live Nation subsidiary promoter might take 10% of the face value of a ticket. A service charge of perhaps a quarter of that face value will then be applied, and some of that money will be going to Live Nation-owned Ticketmaster. The venue will take a cut at this stage, which, in all likelihood, will be a Live Nation-owned venue, too, as it owns 28 festivals and venues UK-wide. The process is repeated at resale, if people go through Ticketmaster at a higher cost than before, leaving Live Nation with an even greater cut.
The Minister does not need to be a public intellectual to see that there is a real perverse incentive for Ticketmaster to see tickets in the hands of touts. He will know that the US Department of Justice has slapped Live Nation with a lawsuit, citing anti-competitive conduct, while it is now well established that the company has a near monopoly in the UK.
Dynamic pricing is quite an effective way of rewarding a near-monopoly, with no upper limit on ticket prices, meaning a greater cut for the parent company. The great sadness of all this is not only that the system is punishing the fans—in this case, those Oasis fans for whom the music was so totemic, so life changing back in the ‘90s—but that, to add insult to injury, there is no trickle down to the live music ecosystem, like the grassroots music venues that Oasis first played in while honing their skills, the venues that made them, such the Boardwalk in Manchester and King Tut’s in Glasgow.
Although Oasis have since announced further tour dates, tickets to new dates will be sold at face value via invitation-only ballot. I cannot help feeling that the fans who paid through the nose via dynamic pricing are going to feel very hard done by.
I encourage the Minister to look at ways to amplify fans’ voices within the live music ecosystem. He might start by responding to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s report into grassroots music, which I have already mentioned. It was published in May. I know that we have had the small matter of a general election since then, but I would like to know when the response is likely to be forthcoming and whether the Government are minded to accept its recommendations. The recommendations include one for a fan-led review of music—something like the fan-led review of football that was led by my still friend, my former hon. Friend, the former Member for Chatham and Aylesford, Tracey Crouch—to look at how the music pyramid functions and how the money trickles down from the big players to those small venues and fledgling songwriters and artists.
The recommendations included a targeted VAT cut, which to grassroots venues would have represented a final hour of salvation in a sector that is widely accepted to be in crisis, and a live music levy, which would take a small proportion of the service fee from the pockets of the big venues and bring them right down to the struggling businesses at the grassroots. What is most pertinent to me about all this is that, while many of the 28 venues and festivals in which Live Nation owns a stake are flourishing, grassroots music venues are closing at a rate of two a week.
I am sure that the Minister is aware that, of the 34 music venues in which Oasis played on their first tour back in 1994, only 11 are still open today. And those venues are so crucial. They are absolutely fundamental to incubate our world-renowned talent. They are the R&D department for the music industry. They are a massive feeder into something that is fundamental to the UK economy and crucial to our soft power around the world. In a ticketing market gone wrong, there might have been a gram of comfort to some of the fans paying through the nose for their ticket if they knew that, in paying it, some of the money was protecting grassroots music venues in their communities and germinating the Oasis of the future.
I know that, like me, the Minister wants nothing more than to see our musical talent continue to thrill fans both at home and around the world, but behind every great act is a chance performance at a low-capacity venue that is struggling to keep the lights on, that is at financial breaking point, and that is a hair’s breadth away from closing its doors.
Chris Bryant
We would not want half-empty venues—despite looking around the Chamber—due to tickets being priced too high, nor venues and festivals that are not economically sustainable. What we should not accept, however—I am very clear about this, as are the Government —are practices that see fans of live events blindsided by price hikes, either because they were not provided with the right information up front or because that information was not provided clearly enough. Doing so might be in breach of existing consumer law, which requires businesses to be fair and transparent in their dealings with consumers. It is the responsibility of the CMA to investigate potential breaches of consumer law arising from or involving the use of dynamic pricing methods, and to take enforcement action where appropriate. I have already referred to its investigation in this case.
It is the responsibility of Government, however, to confront the wider policy questions around the use of dynamic pricing for tickets to live events. We have already said that we will look at this issue further to establish whether consumers are adequately protected under existing law, or whether more needs to be done. The hon. Member for Gosport asked whether this means that we are going to take our eye off the ball on the secondary ticketing market—it does not. We are very clear: we have a set of manifesto commitments, and we will bring out our consultation this autumn. Once we have completed that consultation, we expect to take the necessary action that we committed to in our general election manifesto. Since most of that action is in line with what the Select Committee was advocating before the general election, I hope we might still enjoy the Committee’s support for it.
The hon. Lady is right that we will also be looking at websites: that is part of the whole panoply of action. She also effectively referred to vertical integration within the ticketing system. Of course, that has to be part of our considerations, because it is another part of making sure that the market works for humanity—for fans, artists and the creative industries—rather than all of us having to operate as slaves of the market.
The Prime Minister has said that we are committed to putting fans at the heart of music and ending extortionate resales. As I have said, we will launch a consultation this autumn to work out how best we can do that. That consultation will look at tickets for live events, and a call for evidence on the topic of price transparency, including dynamic pricing, will be sent out. That will help us understand the needs of fans and the live events industry. To be absolutely clear with the House and the hon. Lady, that will be about tickets for live events, not the whole of dynamic pricing across all industries in the UK.
The hon. Lady asked when we will respond to the grassroots venues report from May. We have been getting our feet under the table as fast as we possibly can, and I am very eager to respond to that report in swift order. I take the responsibilities of Select Committees very seriously—I sat on the Culture, Media and Sport Committee from 2001 to 2005; it is one of the most important things I have done as a Member of Parliament—so we will respond as soon as we can. It will certainly be in the autumn, and I would like it to be as soon as possible after the Committee is fully formed.
In conclusion, I would like to thank the hon. Lady for securing this debate. I am not allowed to refer to what she tried to get as urgent questions, but I have now. We have a world-class live events sector in the UK, and I am absolutely determined that fans have every opportunity to experience it at first hand.
There is nothing better than someone standing in an audience—in a crowd, along with hundreds of other people—either experiencing an artist they have never seen before and suddenly realising, “My God, that’s just pierced right through to my heart”, or going to see somebody they have seen 50 times before, having listened to the album 75 times in the past week, and having that joyful moment. They will be different artists for every single one of us, but I want far more people in this country to be able to enjoy that opportunity. I want every child to have a creative education, and I want them to have the opportunities that so many others enjoy in my constituency and every other.
I acknowledge that dynamic pricing can help match supply with demand, resulting in both higher and lower prices, but when it is used as a business model it needs to be transparent and fair, and that is what we want to ensure.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
It was wonderful to hear from two musicians, and Sir Chris Bryant has given away his true old age.
Question put and agreed to.