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UK government wants to give in to Google

A robot writing computer code, generated from that prompt by Dall-e-2

JUST IN TIME to make our festive season hum, the UK government launched a consultation on "AI" and copyright on 17 December. It seems clear from the way it has arranged the questions that it wants to give in to Google. And on 13 January it made it clear that the consultation was a sham - see below.

We single out Google from among the corporations that want to train their chatbots and fake image generators on your work because of a remarkable resemblance between the way the government describes your rights in your work in the consultation document and language used by Google employees seeking to influence African governments.

The consultation is clearly steering its own response towards its Option 3 - clearly, at least, to those who have suffered past such exercises. [Update: now it's official.] This option would create a new exception to copyright in UK for so-called "text and data mining". To pay lip service to your rights in your work, it speaks of "technological solutions" to help you "opt out". It re-frames opting out as you "reserving your rights". On the face of it that framing contravenes Article 5(2) of the Berne Convention, the international law governing copyright: "The enjoyment and the exercise of these rights shall not be subject to any formality..."

There are of course a bunch of other problems, which will take some time to write up. The deadline for responding to the consultation is 25 February 2025.

14 January 2025

Just as we were sitting down to flesh out our reasons for believing that the consultation conclusion was pre-ordained - with a close critical reading of the text - the government saved us the trouble.

A document launched on 13 January entitled AI opporunities action plan proposes to "reform the UK text and data mining regime" - that is, the preferred option in the consultation. Summarising this, the Guardian quoted the composer Ed Newton-Rex, a proponent of artists and authors at least being paid for the use of our work, as saying the plan’s support for copyright overhaul is a “huge blow to the UK’s creative industries”.

The consultation gov.uk

'Artificial Intelligence' our coverage to date

20 December 2024 We corrected a mis-numbering of the preferred option.