Government consultation into AI and Copyright closes today. We have a vision for how both tech and rightsholder industries can thrive
Dan Conway, CEO
| Publishers Association
The Government’s consultation into the UK’s copyright regime and AI closes today, marking a critical moment in the ongoing debate between our world-leading creative industries and Big Tech. The outcome will be a game-changer for the UK and must strike a delicate balance between innovation, regulation and growth.
The publishing industry is a sector with huge potential for growth – indeed the Government has recognised this, hailing the creative industries as one of eight growth-driving sectors in their industrial strategy. Anyone who wants to can see our vibrant, modern publishing sector - worth £11bn to the UK economy, supporting 84,000 jobs and bringing in £4.4bn in exports – in action at the London Book Fair next month when businesses from around the globe descend on Olympia for serious deal-making at one of the largest publishing trade fairs in the world.
And as one of the most resilient and successful of the UK’s creative industries, we can see a future where we contribute even more to the UK’s economy, skills and soft power. Recent independent analysis suggests that with the right conditions the publishing industry can contribute an additional £5.6bn to the UK economy by 2033 and support a further 43,000 jobs, so now is not the time to clip our wings when we could soar.
In our response to the Government’s consultation – which closes just before midnight on 25th February – we are clear that AI is not the enemy. In fact, we see huge potential in AI. Who doesn’t share the Government’s vision for using AI in a safe, ethical and responsible way to help improve ailing public services, provide better outcomes for our health and wellbeing and make our country run more efficiently?
UK publishers are already using AI in their businesses to boost productivity. They are innovators in their own right using AI across a range of content and products: connecting researchers with the high-quality resources and knowledge at the heart of our research ecosystem; helping teachers and learners engage with content and ideas in new and exciting ways; and bringing stories to life for readers of all ages.
As curators of high-quality, valued content, we are also absolutely critical to the development and training of AI models. For AI to produce trusted content, not the fake citations or made-up facts that we need to guard against in an age of mis and disinformation, models must be trained on high-quality inputs. And lots of them. To put it bluntly, garbage in means garbage out. Fortunately, quality content is what the UK publishing industry does better than anyone else.
However, in recent years, we’ve seen the growing evidence of bad actors dominating the AI landscape, using the current lack of regulation for their own economic gain.
These developers have been scraping copyrighted material to train their models without authorisation from the rightsholders or paying for the right to do so. This unpermitted use is happening on a huge scale and the lack of transparency means most rightsholders don’t even know whether their content is being ingested by AI models or not. No wonder creative titans from Sir Paul McCartney to best-selling novelists like Richard Osman and Kate Mosse are among those who have made the case for human creativity to be protected, remunerated and acknowledged by Big Tech.
This great copyright heist cannot continue to go unchallenged.
The Government’s copyright and AI consultation is a generationally important moment for the creative industries and for AI, so the Government needs to avoid a zero-sum game. Their preferred way forward of a new exception to copyright with rights reservation –an ‘opt-out’ model where AI companies can use content unless rightsholders specifically tell them not to do so – feels at the moment like a huge leap of faith as this approach is currently not working anywhere else in the world.
While the UK is not in a position to catch up with the mega tech firms of the USA, we do stand at the cusp of being able to establish ourselves as a content superpower if we get the fundamental legal underpinnings right to support AI innovation in a way that works for the economy and society, based on trustworthy, ethical, and licensed content.
We can have AI innovation and growth without completely overturning our gold standard copyright regime and without sitting idly by while content is taken without permission or payment. To say otherwise is disingenuous.
Our vision starts with the Government, tech and creative sectors working together constructively. That means setting aside reductive views such as ‘copyright just isn’t clear’ and harnessing our best legal, technological and business brains to work on a practical and implementable solution.
A first step the Government could take is to put in place legislation to ensure transparency, so that AI developers must keep records of the content that they are using and disclose these to rightsholders. This would form the basis of a fair commercial marketplace.
Next, we should carefully examine what is currently working and could be scaled – and that is licensing deals. These would give AI developers legal certainty to use specific content while ensuring rightsholders are compensated. Licensing deals have been successful worldwide and align with existing copyright law, but we would need this to work for publishers of all sectors, sizes and specialisms.
And we need all parties to commit to the principle that AI opportunities can be incentivised without allowing publishers’ content – as well as news articles, songs, photographs and art - to be simply taken.
In that way, our vision spells growth and new opportunities for creatives, publishers, tech and the UK economy.
The end of the Copyright and AI consultation, and the heated debates and media coverage it has already sparked, is really just the beginning of what we expect to be a long and complex journey.
Over the course of the 10-week consultation, it has been encouraging to see the extraordinary amount of parliamentary support for stronger copyright and AI regulation. From this point, your support in calling for the Government to make considered and evidence-based choices will make the difference between an outcome which turbocharges growth and one which risks jeopardising our position as a world-leader in academia, the arts and creativity.
You can read the Publishers Association’s response to the Copyright and AI consultation on their website once the consultation closes.
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