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”.
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 current 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.”