DACS joins with Creative Rights in AI Coalition to warn against mirroring EU approach and rejects suggestion of ‘uncertainty’ in UK law

Following the Prime Minister’s broad commitment to take forward the Plan’s recommendations, DACS and other organisations part of the Creative Rights in AI Coalition are calling on the government to provide assurances that all options in the Copyright and AI Consultation – including enforcing the existing copyright regime with transparency provisions – remain on the table.

It is deeply concerning to see the EU approach looked to as a regime that the UK should mirror. The EU is still working out how to implement its EU AI Act and there are persistent questions over the workability of their opt-out regime. This serves as a real-time warning for the government about imitating regimes that have shown no signs of being effective. The UK should learn from the EU regime’s shortcomings, not blindly imitate it.

Furthermore, there is no ‘uncertainty’ in the UK text and data mining regime: it is clear that UK copyright law does not allow text and data mining for commercial purposes without a licence. The only uncertainty is around who has been using the UK’s creative crown jewels as training material without permission and how they got hold of it, making transparency provisions vital.

DACS supports this collective statement from rightsholders across the creative and media sectors. Fundamentally, the onus should not be on rights holders to prevent AI firms from exploiting their data without permission or renumeration, and the principles of copyright should be upheld. From a survey of 1000 artists, we found that 84% were open to licensing their work so long as they received fair pay. But a barrier to licensing AI is that developers are not transparent about what works they have used for training and have not been willing to negotiate licences with all rightsholders. The Government should focus on improving licensing deals that bring fair pay and legal certainty, without needing to remove copyright protections.