UK blinks on AI copyright carve-out after star-studded revolt The UK government has backed off plans to allow AI companies to access copyrighted material for free for training purposes by default. The shift in stance follows complaints from leading figures in the creative industries – including Paul McCartney, Elton John, Coldplay, writer/director Richard Curtis, artist Antony Gormley, …
Re “The success of the AI sector and the CIs are intertwined”
Only if you let the “AI” companies walk all over …well …everyone
I cannot think of another industry in history that has had governments changing long-standing laws and rules to accommodate them AT THE EXPENSE of everyone else. In fact it’s not even “at the expense” - it’s outright theft and people are trying to change laws to make it officially legal theft - by (mostly) foreign business!
Enclosures happened from the middle ages onwards in response to growing populations. There were certainly plenty in the years just before the famine of the late 1310s although some of these would have reverted during the famine and the Black Death. The usual term was enclosure from the waste which was how the commons were usually expressed. An example is the second volume of the Wakefield manorial roles (William Paley Baildon Ed, 1906, Yorks Arch Soc Record Series V XXXVI). In 1307 successive courts worked they way round the graveships, each sitting granting man assarts (the technical term). (Archive .org has a lot of YAS publications.)
Although one identifiable pattern in upland Britain was to push settlement uphill (much the same thing happened later in the years leading up to the Famine in Ireland) another was to establish satellite hamlets along lanes just outside the common fields. I think that was due to the fact that if the fields surrounded a village they limited the number of houses that could be built inside them. The clue in documents is someone living "in the lane". The people making these settlements were the villagers, your "common folk".
Without bringing more land under intensive agriculture it would have been impossible to feed growing populations. The Parliamentary enclosures were just the last phase. If you really want a landlordism phenomenon to get your teeth into you should look into evictions which were the exact opposite of enclosure - getting rid of the population to graze manorial flocks where here had previously been cultivation and the consequent creation of rotten boroughs.
Which led to different parts of the country specialising in what grew best locally and growing cash crops, which led to villages growing in population beyond simple subsistence and ultimately led to the enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the modern world and the rise of AI
So we can all agree we blame medieval sheep
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The 18th century radical, William Cobbett was not so undecided. He would have been enormously pleased for the "Great Wen" to have starved into nonexistence.
He incidentally also published an equally inflammatory "Register."
Except that most of the people mentioned in the article are rich and they don't want this to happen.
As a published author (not a financially successful one I hasten to add) I refuse to use any AI tool even in my research for my work. TBH, I'd rather spend a week at Kew (British Library) or any of the county archives getting real data than relying on an AI tool which may or may not give me accurate data. I don't write for the money and writing will never make me rich but I don't care about the mulah.
The advantage of doing analogue archive and library search is it allows the brain time to work ie. Digest the material. Many times this “back brain” activity has enabled me to gain “lightbulb” realisations and insights into the subject and thus greatly help in my development of a solution to the problem I’m grappling with.
Because once the UK is known as en environment which permits AI theft of copyright works, no author, artist, or other creative designer whose work can be represented on a computer will want to allow their work to be published here. I would consider the loss of much 'modern art' as no great problem, but peoples' taste varies and somebody would regret any part of what we lost.
So Paul McCartney - who didn't own his own catalogue for decades - is now the face of protecting creators' rights. Touching.
Let's be honest about what happened here. One set of corporate interests (AI companies wanting free training data) lost a lobbying battle to another set of corporate interests (major labels and publishers wanting a new licensing revenue stream). The celebrity names are the front. The actual beneficiaries are the entities that own the catalogues.
And the proposed solution tells you everything: "market-led licensing approaches" and a "commercial licensing pilot platform." That's not creator protection. That's the construction of a new rent-extraction layer where Universal Music Group negotiates bulk access deals and the bedroom producer gets nothing, exactly like streaming.
Funny how none of these famous voices were anywhere to be found while Spotify was paying £0.003 per stream and destroying the livelihoods of working musicians for fifteen years. Almost as if they only show up when the interests of the rights-holding infrastructure behind them are threatened.
The AI scraping exception was bad policy. But let's not pretend this is artists defeating big tech. This is big content defeating big tech, with famous faces stapled to the press release.
>none of these famous voices were anywhere to be found while Spotify was paying £0.003 per stream
Because they remember the days when you not only didn't get paid anything for being on Radio but you had to provide cocaine and agreeable (very) young women to the DJs to get any play at all
>> This is why we can confirm today that the Government no longer has a preferred option.
Why not have a preferred option: no copying/scraping by AI tools unless the copyright holder grants it? It's not that hard.
>> The government also said it would monitor litigation around AI and copyright in the UK and elsewhere,
Enrich the lawyers. Just think how unnecessary this would be if AI scraping was made a criminal offence. Haul the scrapers before the courts. Then time in the chokey for when they 'accidentally' break the law. Make it a strict liability offence.
Instead, the AI scrapers will scrape and copy as before.
There's a large and obvious difference between those two things. But even if you can't recognize that, that doesn't work for the data that isn't publicly accessible or was but not legally so, especially when the companies that collected it deleted the copyright notices that restricted their actions or questioned whether to use a known illegal source, got permission, and built a tool specifically to use it.
Don't weep over the plights of "leading figures in the creative industries". Their alleged talents have been more than sufficiently rewarded.
Spare your pity for the shareholders, senior executives, and skilled employees, in the manufacture and distribution of recorded entertainment. For example, record labels typically retain 70-90% of music revenue from sources like streaming, sales, and downloads in traditional "deals". So-called 'artists' (formerly called 'artistes') receive the remaining 10-30% as royalties, often after recoupment of advances and expenses. Ensembles of artistes share the royalty proceeds.
The industry bears losses associated with 'investing' in particular players. Various facets of entertainment must spend thought and resources on shaping public taste. In the context of ensuing complexity, most supposed 'talent' is interchangeable.
Profit from entertainment entails taxing demands (and creative accounting to minimise another meaning of 'tax'). Copyright is what makes the industry exceedingly profitable; without monopoly powers and a pseudo-market unreliant upon 'price discovery', the noble efforts of entertainment company executives to promote a healthy environment for the creation and the dissemination of culture would come to nought. For many people, 'it stands to reason' that talent is scarce, with its discovery and its display meriting drawing heavily on ordinary people's discretionary disposable incomes.
[This comment created with assistance from 'Perplexity AI'. Ensuing wisdom donated to the Commons.]
Don't weep over the plights of "leading figures in the creative industries". Their alleged talents have been more than sufficiently rewarded.
And what about the next generation? Or is it just going to be rehashed scrapings from no on?
Or is it just going to be rehashed scrapings from no on?
Well, the 'pop' [1] music industry has largely lived on that for the last 30 years so why change now? There are (obviously) a growing movement of youngsters who (gasp) actually write their own music but a lot of the older stuff is boring, formulaic repetition of stuff that the public has bought before.
[1] Including all the various forms of (c)rap music - most of which just seem to be just reciting nonsense over stolen samples.
Have Microsoft provided the full source of Windows, Office etc to train the publicly available copilot model?
If a government with access to the source code did so, would the resulting output be copyright free?
Copilot doesn't believe so.
"There is no publicly available statement indicating that Microsoft has supplied Windows source code—a highly protected, closed-source asset—to train Copilot or any other public LLM. Searches of Microsoft’s official announcements and documentation reveal no such disclosure, and historically, Microsoft guards Windows source code extremely tightly."
