The UK Government has begun a consultation on clarifying copyright laws as it seeks to strike a balance between supporting the ambitions of AI businesses and ensuring protection and payment for content creators.
The consultation also explores how creators can license and be remunerated for the use of their material, and how wide access to high-quality data for AI developers can be strengthened to enable innovation across the UK AI sector.
The consultation proposes introducing an exception to copyright law for AI training for commercial purposes while allowing rights holders to reserve their rights, so they can control the use of their content in a bid to give them more certainty and control over how their content is used and support them to strike licensing deals, while also giving AI developers greater certainty about what material they can and cannot use and ensure wide access to material in the UK.
The consultation also proposes new requirements for AI model developers to be more transparent about their model training datasets and how they are obtained. For example, AI developers could be required to provide more information about what content they have used to train their models.
Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Peter Kyle, said: ”It’s clear that our current AI and copyright framework does not support either our creative industries or our AI sectors to compete on the global stage.
“That is why we are setting out a balanced package of proposals to address uncertainty about how copyright law applies to AI so we can drive continued growth in the AI sector and creative industries.
“This is all about partnership: balancing strong protections for creators while removing barriers to AI innovation; and working together across government and industry sectors to deliver this.”
The government said it welcomes licensing deals that have already been agreed — but it warned that many more creatives and right holders have not been able to do so under the current copyright regime.
The consultation also recognises issues related to the protection of personality rights in the context of digital replicas, such as deepfake imitations of individuals, and will seek views on whether the current legal frameworks are sufficiently robust to tackle the issue.
The consultation will run for 10 weeks, closing on 25th February, 2025.
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