Government defeat in Lords over protecting copyright from AI data scraping
Government defeat in Lords over protecting copyright from AI data scraping
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The Government has been defeated in the Lords over measures to protect creatives from having their copyrighted work used to train AI models without permission or remuneration. Peers voted 145 to 126, majority 19, in favour of a package of amendments to the Data (Use and Access) Bill aiming to tackle the unauthorised use of intellectual property by big tech companies scraping data for AI.
Proposing the amendments, digital rights campaigner Baroness Kidron said they would help enforce existing property rights by improving transparency and laying out a redress procedure. The measures would explicitly subject AI companies to UK copyright law, regardless of where they are based, reveal the names and owners of web crawlers that currently operate anonymously and allow copyright owners to know when, where and how their work is used.
This, she said, would “protect the incomes of the UK’s second most valuable industrial sector”. Lady Kidron’s group of amendments received cross-party support, with both Labour and Conservative peers rebelling against their own front benches to back the measures.
This comes after the Government suggested it may introduce an exemption to copyright law for “text and data mining”. A consultation on the issue is currently underway and is due to end on February 25. Independent crossbench peer Lady Kidron said the Government’s stated preferred option of an “opt-out” system would simply “give away other people’s living and their VAT contribution to the Treasury and with it the jobs, joy and soft power of our creative industries that our country relies on globally”.
