The Creative Rights in AI Coalition, which the ALCS, the Association of Authors’ Agents, the Publishers Association and the Society of Authors are all members of, has responded to the government’s AI consultation and urged it to “enforce copyright law through transparency without compromising rights”.
On Tuesday this week (17th December), the government launched an open consultation on proposals to give creative industries and artificial intelligence (AI) developers clarity over copyright laws. The government said the new proposals seek to bring legal certainty to creative and AI sectors over how copyright protected materials are used in model training, “supporting innovation and boosting the growth of both sectors crucial to our Plan for Change”.
The package of proposals aims to give creators greater control over how their material is used by AI developers. The proposals also aim to enhance creators’ ability to be paid for the use of their material and to seek greater transparency from AI firms over the data used to train models and how AI-generated content is labelled. The consultation will run for 10 weeks, closing on 25th February 2025.
The Creative Rights in AI Coalition said: “While members are still digesting the details of the consultation, rights holders do not support the new exception to copyright proposed. In fact, rights holders consider that the priority should be to ensure that current copyright laws are respected and enforceable.
“The only way to guarantee creative control and spur a dynamic licensing – and generative AI – market is for the onus to be on generative AI developers to seek permission and engage with rights holders to agree licences. We welcome proposals for transparency measures which will allow rights holders to understand how their work has been used, but these should be implemented to make existing copyright law enforceable, rather than being offered as a ‘trade-off’ for the degradation of copyright protections.”
