New law may be needed to end AI copyright disputes

Labour’s new minister for AI and digital government expects to resolve copyright disputes between British AI companies and the creative industries “by the end of the year”.
Feryal Clark, speaking at The Times Tech Summit, said the solution could come in the form of an amendment to existing laws or completely new legislation.
“Whether that’s legislation or amendment to a policy, that’s yet to be decided. But we are working through what we need to do to resolve the issue and to bring clarity to both the AI sector [and] also to creative industries,” she said.
“They both are incredibly important to the UK’s economy so we need to actually resolve this. It’s been going on for far too long.”
Pressed on when she expected an agreement, Clark said she thought one could be reached “in the very near future, by the end of this year”.
The comments represented a walkback from commitments made by Clark at the Labour Party conference, where she said that she was “in the process of bringing forward legislation” and that she hoped “to be going out to consultation in the very near future” which she suggested at the time could be as soon as October.
Resolving the dispute has long been seen as essential to ensuring the UK remains a home for cutting-edge AI research.
In March 2023, Sir Patrick Vallance said in his review of pro-innovation regulation that there was an urgent need to find a solution to the barriers faced by AI businesses in accessing copyright material to train their models.
The legal framework in the UK does not allow unauthorised copying of copyright-protected content for training AI models, except in cases where it is done for purely non-commercial purposes.
The Conservative government struggled to broker a deal between creative industry stakeholders and AI companies regarding the use of copyrighted material to train models. In February this year it confirmed that the government would not be able to reach a voluntary code between the two industries.
Clark said that she wanted to place AI “at the heart of government” in addition to bolstering the UK’s world-leading AI sector. “There is a plan to kickstart an era of economic growth to ensure that we are improving public services and to ensure that we’re improving life for working people across the country,” she said.
“That means looking at how we are delivering our services at the moment, looking at [public services] and where the opportunities for AI are to transform those services.”
However, in the following event at the summit Neil Lawrence, a professor of machine learning at the University of Cambridge, said it was “extremely dangerous” to look to replace parts of public services with AI.
The Labour government recently cancelled several big investments in AI announced by the previous, Conservative government including an £800 million, exascale supercomputer at Edinburgh University that was intended to perform one billion calculations each second.
Clark said the Conservatives had not provided any funding for the projects in the first place, adding that Labour was “absolutely committed” to looking at the projects in the future.
As stated in the Labour Party manifesto, Clark confirmed the new government would bring forward an AI bill but added it would be “very narrow in focus and remit” and would focus on the “frontier models of the future”, rather than simpler AI models.
She added that the government was in conversations with the sector and hopes to bring forward proposals including placing the AI Safety Institute, created in April 2023, on to statutory footing and formalising the commitments made at the AI Safety Summit in November last year.