Data (Use and Access) Bill [Lords]

Polly Billington Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 12th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Pete Wishart]

This is where the right hon. Gentleman and I do profoundly disagree. I look at this arrangement and the partnership across the European Union as a positive—it is a good thing. We were major contributors to some of the EU directives put forward on copyright and artificial intelligence. They miss us, and we miss them; we were just so much better when we were in partnership. I think we will just have to respectfully agree to disagree as we go forward on this particular issue.

[Ms Polly Billington (East Thanet) (Lab)]

I am keen to emphasise that it is of course possible for us to align ourselves with the European directive that the previous Government constructed before leaving the European Union in order to be able to maintain good creative copyright protections for our creatives, without us necessarily having to rejoin the European Union.

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[Pete Wishart]

Far be it from me, who am on my feet, to get in the way of a conversation between the right hon. Gentleman and the Minister. I was interested by that little exchange. The right hon. Gentleman is right: we have to be careful when it comes to issues such as this. Given his experience of the House, he will have observed over the years some of the ways in which people who are able to make representations can be abused. As we go forward in such a critical area, he is right to issue a warning, and I think the House has heard what he has had to say.

Clauses 135 to 139 are the creative industries’ safeguard and guarantee in the face on an almost existential threat to their ability to sustain themselves and continue to bring that uncontaminated joy of human imagination to the people we represent. They would help to tackle the unauthorised use of intellectual property by big tech companies scraping data for AI. They would enforce transparency and lay out a redress procedure. They would explicitly subject AI companies to UK copyright law, regardless of where they are based in the world. That means—and this is a critical point—that those companies would have to reveal the names and owners of web crawlers that currently operate anonymously. Most importantly, they would allow copyright owners to know when, where and how their work is to be used.

To develop and thrive, our artists need the best possible conditions and political environment, and we have delivered that over the decades. That is why we lead the world when it comes to our contribution to the creative industries, and why we make such massive gross value added in every single sector in which we are predominant. Our leading artists give us a soft power that is the envy of the world, and we must not do anything that threatens our ability to retain it. We have a gold standard IP rights framework enshrined in UK law. We have a copyright regime that protects our artists, and ensures that their wonderful works are properly recognised and that they are remunerated for the products of their imagination.

[Ms Billington]

I am interested by the hon. Gentleman’s remarks about the importance of these clauses—amendments from the other place—which, in principle, I support. He has also mentioned the importance of ensuring that proper scrutiny takes place when it comes to, for example, the tech companies making representations in this place, but those amendments suggest that that would be dealt with only through secondary legislation. If we have an opportunity, as presented by those on the Front Bench, to suggest that we could have proper, primary legislation, why should we accept the idea of secondary legislation, which does not allow for sufficient scrutiny to ensure that we are providing the necessary protections, when we should be debating primary legislation in this Chamber?

[Pete Wishart]

I have probably not explained exactly what my fears and concerns are, and that is probably typical of me. What we currently have in the Bill is a guarantee that we will respect copyright and ensure that there is transparency. Until I am presented with something that covers all the issues that are covered in clauses 135 to 139, with all the security that they would give our creative industries, I will back those clauses to the hilt, and will do everything possible to ensure that they remain within the Bill. If the Minister, as he seems to be suggesting, is going to come back to us with a different Bill, let us see it. Let us see if it does all the things that we all want when it comes to backing our creative sector. If it contains all the provisions that will ensure that our copyright framework is respected, and if transparency is on the face of it, I will back it in a flash; but until I see it, this is all that I have got, and all that the House has got, and we should make sure that we defend and protect it.

There is an idea that somehow our copyright laws are broken. They are not broken at all; our copyright laws work perfectly well. The only people who have an issue with our copyright laws are those running the AI tech giants, who find that such laws get in the way of what they want to do and achieve. Their intention and ambition is to ingest our creative heritage, and to scrape the world for the last bit of human imagination and creative content. That is what has created difficulties and confusion about our copyright regime. There is nothing wrong with our laws. They are really good and the envy of so many, and they have served us well.

I will support the Bill as it goes through the House. As I have said to the Minister, it is a good Bill that generally does all the right things when it comes to data use, which should be supported. It is a better Bill because of the amendments, and I will continue to support it. But if the Minister has a Bill that he wants to present to this House, could he please get on with it? There is a consultation going on just now, which ends, I think, in two weeks on Wednesday. At that point, we will have the information that we require, and I suspect that we will find an overwhelming desire to see our copyright regime protected and defended. If the Minister has a Bill, bring it on. In the meantime, we must support the provisions and clauses in this Bill.

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[Max Wilkinson]

The Minister will be delighted to hear that there will be no Paddington references. Ministers have set out the core objectives of the Bill: growing the economy, improving public services and making people’s lives easier. No one is going to disagree with any of that. Those aims are laudable, and I support them, as do the Liberal Democrats.

However, there are concerns. I will focus on an area that others have already touched on, and speak in support of amendments that have come to us from the House of Lords relating to the creative industries and copyright. While the Bill seeks to improve lives, we worry that the consultation currently being undertaken by the Government leaves open a risk that incentives for human creativity will be removed entirely, and that we will end up in future with many tens of thousands of shades of pale grey.

At the heart of our creative sector is the ability of the human hand to paint or draw, or to write music that moves us, and of the human brain to compose verse that persuades people, makes the hair stand up on the back of our necks and changes the world for the better. Protecting that must be absolutely central to what we do as we embrace technology, but the risk of AI is that those protections are lost.

For the avoidance of doubt, and in the absence of clarity from the official Opposition, we back a system that would protect the IP of creatives; that is, an opt-in system. I would give way to the shadow Minister if he wanted to clarify the Conservative party’s position—he does not. The default must be that creative content is protected. Even AI models, if we ask them, admit the risk to human creativity if IP is not protected by an opt-in model. While the Conservative party has criticised us on that, at least we have an opinion.

[Ms Billington]

I want to emphasise and build on what my hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Anneliese Midgley) pointed out in relation to music. We need to understand which creative sectors are most vulnerable to generative AI. It is those that have been easily replicable through other forms of technology in the past: music, writing and the visual arts, in particular photography. I say that because it is sometimes misunderstood that some creative sectors are more vulnerable than others, and if we do not understand that they have different regimes for how they are protected, there are risks of not being able to properly protect them.

[Max Wilkinson]

The hon. Lady’s contribution is as right as all the others she has made during this debate and the general debate a couple of weeks ago.

I will immediately move on to the point that data is an abstract term and is being used to cover all sorts of information in these debates. Yet all data is not equal and our legislation must properly reflect that. For example, there is a clear and obvious role for AI in processing health data in a way that helps doctors with diagnosis and benefits patients with faster treatment. The same might apply to the chats we have with our local councils about bins, planning or licensing. Yet even though no one will disagree that the UK firms innovating in science, medicine, climate change and other key industries must not be stymied, the training data for other AI systems—the data we are talking about—is literature, poetry, music and art. Those are things that are creative in essence. It is not just data; it is creative endeavour and an extremely human form.

One of the options in the current consultation would abolish the copyright protections that underpin the livelihoods of our creative sector and, as others have said, that would be ruinous for the creative industries. Furthermore, the unintended consequences could actually harm the long-term development of AI models that we will all come to rely on. High-quality data is essential for training good AI models, but publicly available human-created text data might become the minority online. We have all seen the mistakes that AI can produce and a model trained on bad data will only produce bad results. The Government are rightly ambitious for AI, and part of that ambition must include producing models with traceable data that the public can be assured meets a high standard. Ministers should be embracing our copyright laws precisely because that is a means to improve AI, as well as protecting our creatives.

A reliable licensing system will ensure that AI models are being created using high-quality, human-generated data. Oversight of what is used to train those models will only help to build trust in what is a very new technology that the public is sceptical about. To that end, the Liberal Democrats support the amendments that have come from the House of Lords, which seek to strengthen the rights of creatives. The Government must think carefully about which side of the argument they support, and I have been pleased to hear some of the Secretary of State and the Minister’s reassurances today. We will be watching closely.

We can take more positives from other parts of the Bill, and to reflect on that, I will move on to discuss some constituency matters. I am more optimistic about the Bill’s potential to improve the situation of bereaved parents, which the Minister and I have discussed fairly recently, and I hope Ministers will confirm that that opportunity will be taken.

Many in the House will be familiar with the story of my constituent, Ellen Roome, who tragically lost her 14-year-old son Jools to suicide. In her search for answers about the circumstances leading up to Jools’s death, Ellen has come up against outdated laws and social media giants taking an intransigent approach to sharing data that should naturally be hers as a parent. We are talking about the things that, in the past, she would have been able to find out by looking through her child’s bedroom—things that might have been in wardrobes, stored under the bed or in school notes. These days, those bits of data will be on multiple social media accounts.

This is the subject of my private Member’s Bill, the Social Media (Access to Accounts) Bill, also known as the Jools’ law Bill. This Bill would give parents access rights to their deceased child’s data automatically, so other grieving parents will never face the challenges and the huge legal costs that Ellen has had to endure. I note the plans announced by Ministers include establishing an information commission with a duty to ensure children’s data is protected. This is a welcome step which I hope will strengthen the protections children badly need online, but we must ensure the commission is effectively resourced to take on the social media giants, who have made it clear that they only want profit.

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[Chris Bryant]

I will in a moment, if the hon. Member lets me finish this point. I know that people are sceptical because such a means does not exist at the moment. I have said before that the robots.txt system does not work; it effectively means that a person is wiped from the internet, and lots of people do not know how to use it—it is far too technical. If, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North said, there were a system of simple digital fingerprinting where people could say, “No, you can’t use my work” or, “Yes, you can use my work for large language model training once you’ve remunerated me,” that would be a great outcome for everybody, because it would lead to a new system of remuneration. That could be done individually or for an artist, it could be done through DACS, and for a musician it could be done through their record label.

[Ms Billington]

Will the Minister give way?

[Chris Bryant]

I will in a moment. That is why I am keen on not selling the pass on that possibility by having undermined it before we get there.

[Chris Bryant]

No, it is not. What is true is that, as I said, we want to get to a concrete idea of what transparency might look like. Not enough work has been done in the EU or in different territories—in the United States of America, for instance, where different states have different arrangements—and we need to do more about what that should look like in the UK. As I say, if the creative industries and the AI companies can do that together, that could give us a nugget of useful progress. Likewise, if we can get to what I am calling fingerprinting, for want of a better term—I know there is a system of fingerprinting—that would get us to the licensing of 60%, 70% or 80%, and that would be significant. I do not want to sell the pass on that whole package by taking too many steps at this point, but we will discuss this in Committee and on Report. I am conscious that I have Margate behind me, so I give way.

[Ms Billington]

It is not only Margate; East Thanet has three cultural drivers—Margate, Ramsgate and Broadstairs—all with phenomenal amounts of cultural engine throughout the centuries. Many writers such as Wilkie Collins and Jane Austen are well out of copyright. Musicians, visual artists and writers often earn little money. It is great to hear that we will have those working groups. They need to be confident that they will be paid by the machines, as it were, because otherwise they will end up even worse off than they are at the moment. Some 40% of greetings card designers have lost their job because of this issue. I urge the hon. Gentleman to come to Margate to hear what is being said by the creative industries here, and I am glad to hear that the Secretary of State is also keen to meet those in the creative industries.