Creative types have the upper hand in AI copyright fight
‘‘ Pimli-code, Belgrav-ai ... many in London’s tech sector have been love-bombing the UK capital on X this week, with one even jokingly renaming some of its famous quarters.
It’s called “Londonmaxxing”. London, they say, is a far better place to “build” than Silicon Valley itself (“build” being tech-speak for “grow a business”). It’s the talent, the diversity, the ambition, the pubs but also the culture, they coo, which makes it such an attractive place to live and work. Ah, the culture.
These adoring words bely a showdown between the tech and creative industries, which is hurtling down the tracks.
By March 18, the government has committed to update parliament with how it plans to resolve the thorny issue of copyright in the age of artificial intelligence. It has been a long time coming. At The Times Tech Summit in 2024, Feryal Clark, then minister for AI, said the issue was going to be resolved by the end of the year. That year.
Artists, musicians, writers and journalists have long been furious that their work has been used by tech companies to train AI models without recompense or recognition. They describe it as a theft that undermines the UK’s top-notch copyright regime.
Tech companies argue that they need access to this data for scientific advancement. They are calling for a “text and data mining” (TDM) exemption regime, that says for the purposes of training AI, they don’t need to ask permission from copyright holders.
Under this legal loophole, their bots could burrow away, analysing text and data for patterns, trends and other useful information which almost always means making digital copies of the works being analysed. Without it, well, that triggers the age-old Silicon Valley threat: driving American AI investment out of the UK.
The creative industries are pushing back hard. They are used to cowering before the financial might of Big Tech, but in this debate, with the more convincing case and a lot of clout, the artists might actually win.
Far from being a purely British issue, this bitter debate is being fought in courts around the world. In one of the most high-profile cases, The New York Times is taking OpenAI and Microsoft to court for allegedly stealing its journalism to train ChatGPT.
In a strident report last week, members of the House of Lords digital committee made it very clear where they stand. Any watering down of copyright would harm the creative industries and the wider economy.
“The UK faces a choice between two futures,” the committee said. “In the first, the UK becomes a worldleading home for responsible, licensing-based artificial intelligence (AI) development ... In the second scenario, the UK continues to drift towards tacit acceptance of largescale, unlicensed use of creative content and long-term dependence on opaque models trained overseas, with most benefits accruing to a small number of US-based firms while harms to UK creators grow.”
There is a strong economic argument to back this up. In 2024 the UK’s creative industries contributed £145.8 billion to the economy while the entire AI sector contributed £11.8 billion. “It would be a poor bet,” the Lords committee said, “to sacrifice the UK’s outstanding creative capacity for speculative AI gains.”
Data was described as “the new oil” back in 2006. As the owners of information, musicians and artists hold the precious source of the well.
The future strength of AI depends on the quality and integrity of the data they provide. Verified, accurate, human-made content is essential for improving models’ accuracy.
The UK possesses a wealth of first-rate creative information, and its strong copyright framework incentivises AI developers to enter into formal licensing deals to access it; the kinds of agreements that media organisations (including News Corp, owner of The Times) have struck in recent years.
This in turn gives AI firms operating legally in the UK an advantage in building more accurate, better-performing models.
As well as the data advantage, a new obsession with AI sovereignty — British control of AI — also plays to the creative industries’ strengths in this debate. It has been sparked by tense geopolitics as well as fears over Donald Trump’s control of the USdominated tech industry and how he might wield that power.
There is a growing awareness of the importance of what the current minister for AI, Kanishka Narayan, has said is “strategic leverage when it comes to this technology, such that it can ensure ongoing access to critical inputs, and ongoing assurance that its wider economic and national security objectives can be met more broadly”.
The government has launched a £500 million Sovereign AI Unit to invest in and support AI companies. The subject is even being debated in Westminster Hall this afternoon.
As the Lords underlined, rather than the UK becoming permanently dependent on “opaque” data-scraping American models, there are working examples, like Switzerland’s Apertus model, of competitive homegrown AI that follows copyright rules and is transparent. This is something the UK could follow.
Looking around the world, no one is satisfied with any of the solutions advanced so far. Japan has introduced the “commercial TDM exception”, which has upset local designers, as AI video tools generate convincing anime-style video.
The EU has plumped for an “optout” regime, so AI companies can train on copyrighted content without asking permission, unless creators say otherwise. Both sides describe this as vague and unworkable. Perhaps we need to accept there will be no pleasing everyone.
The stakes are enormous for this debate because the outcome will shape who controls our cultural infrastructure. With their economic clout and the current sentiment around tech control, the creative industries stand a good chance of coming out on top.
Katie Prescott is Technology Business Editor of The Times
