World IP Day 2025’s theme is 'IP and music: Feel the beat of IP'. In this article, our copyright solicitors focus on the current 'beat of IP' for musicians, other creatives, and the tech sector: the recent UK Government consultation on copyright protection in the UK in the context of AI development.
Can machines be truly creative? Who owns the rights to what they produce? What happens when AI is trained using someone’s copyright-protected work without their permission?
These questions are asked by UK’s creative industries and the tech sector in view of the rapid development and use of AI. Both sectors are vital to the economy. Both require clear answers. There are different views on each side of this debate as to what the law should protect and allow.
Contents:
What is the issue?
AI has developed at breathtaking speed in recent years, with AI systems now capable of creating art, writing stories, and producing music. Despite its abilities, AI is not capable of original thought. It cannot come up with new ideas, instead, it uses existing material to generate a piece of work. This has led to a debate between the creative industries, who feel their fundamental right to control the use of their work is under threat, and technology companies, who claim that the UK will lose billions of pounds by preventing AI developers from using material freely.
AI developers need access to vast amounts of material to train their AI models. They collect it using methods like web scraping and data mining, which collect content from third-party websites, analyse it, and generate work based on common patterns. Much of that content will be copyright protected, it cannot be used without its owner’s permission, including for commercial purposes. Given how web scraping and data mining work, rights owners are currently struggling to control the use of their work in training AI.
The Government is keen to ensure that the UK is at the forefront of AI innovation, with the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, seeing it as a chance to ‘turbocharge growth.’ However, it also recognises the need to safeguard the integrity and rights of our creative industries, which contribute around £124 billion to the UK economy each year.
Copyright is integral to rights protection for creatives, including musicians, authors, and artists. Establishing the right approach allowing for the successful co-existence of AI development and copyright protection is essential. In December 2024, the Government launched a consultation on copyright and AI seeking views on how it might support the continuing development of AI while promoting innovation and creativity among individuals. The consultation proposed four options and asked for the relevant feedback:
- Option 0: Do nothing and keep copyright law unchanged. Few support this approach because it creates significant uncertainty for both AI developers and creatives.
- Option 1: Strengthen copyright protection for creatives by requiring copyright licensing in all cases. In accordance with this option, AI developers could only use copyright works to train AI if they obtain express licences from the rights owners.
- Option 2: Introduce a blanket data mining exception to copyright law, allowing AI developers to use copyright works as training materials. Some countries, including Singapore, have adopted this approach.
- Option 3: Introduce a data mining exception but allow rights owners to opt out if they do not want their work to be used for commercial purposes. This is the approach adopted by the EU.
The Government’s proposed approach favours option 3, believing it would strike a balance between enabling AI development while maintaining copyright protection for rights owners.
What do tech companies say about the copyright consultation on AI?
Technology businesses are likely to support any move by the Government to relax copyright rules around AI training. It gives them greater access to data, speeds up innovation and reduces legal risk when using third-party content, all of which would make it easier to develop and launch competitive AI products. They argue that, as things stand, the current copyright law regime in the UK places the country at a disadvantage on the global stage and risks technological developments shifting to other jurisdictions that adopt a less rigid approach, like Singapore. They claim that placing overly burdensome requirements on AI developers will deprive the UK of its chance to shape the future development of AI and reap the rewards.
TechUK, a trade association for the UK tech sector, favours the Government’s option 2. It argues that a broad data mining exception to copyright law would give the UK a strong competitive advantage by encouraging tech companies to centre their operations here. Citing research from an independent think tank focused on growth and progress in the UK, The Centre of British Progress, TechUK warns that imposing a restrictive licencing regime of the type proposed by the Government’s option 1 could result in a loss of nearly £30 billion to the UK economy over the next five years. The above research suggests that a more relaxed regime could not only prevent such loss, but also generate around £22 billion in income over the same period.
What does the creative sector say about the copyright consultation on AI?
As expected, the rapid development of AI is a hot topic in the creative industry, with many well-known figures speaking out against the Government’s proposals to relax copyright laws. Sir Elton John has commented that the changes would enable tech companies to ‘ride roughshod’ over the established copyright principles that protect artists’ livelihoods. Sir Paul McCartney urged the Government to ‘protect the creative thinkers, the creative artists, or you’re not going to have them.’
For most creatives, copyright protection is fundamental in making their work financially worthwhile. The industry as a whole believes that the Government’s option 3 would offer little protection for its members since opting out would be incredibly onerous and confusing and, in practice, difficult to track and execute.
Instead, the industry believes that the Government’s option 1 is the fairest solution, arguing that it would prevent tech companies from effectively using artists’ work without ensuring they are fairly remunerated.
What does the copyright consultation on AI mean for you?
With so much uncertainty, it is impossible to predict what the future holds for AI developers and the creative industries in the UK. If the Government proceeds with option 3, i.e., introducing a data mining exception to copyright laws for AI training with the option for rights holders to reserve their rights, it will need to give careful consideration as to how the system would operate in practice. For it to work, there would need to be a simple way for creatives to exercise their right to opt-out, either on an individual or collective basis. What that opt-out would look like is unclear at this stage. Even in the EU, where the regime is already in place, there remains uncertainty over exactly what rights owners should do to opt-out.
As things stand in the UK, anyone using your creative work without your permission may be liable for copyright infringement. Given the lack of transparency from tech companies over the material they are using to train their AI systems, many rights owners are unaware of how their work is being used in AI training.
Several measures may assist you in protecting your work, many of which mirror what rights owners are doing in the EU to opt out of their work being used by AI developers. These include:
- Including a robots.txt file on your website to inform AI bots that you do not consent to them scraping your site. Most (but not all) crawlers respect instructions given by robots.txt files. If you use a robots.txt file, you should update it regularly to ensure it covers any new AI developers.
- Including a copyright notice and opt out information in the metadata of files like images, videos, and music.
- Notifying AI developers that you do not consent to your works being used in AI training.
How you do this depends on the developer, for example, OpenAi is currently developing tools that enable rights owners to notify it of their rights and whether they agree to their works being used for AI training and research.
Technologies are also emerging to simplify the notification process, such as Spawning’s Do Not Train Registry. Spawning is an independent startup developing machine readable opt out tools for rights owners and AI developers.
Some developers have already agreed to honour the wishes of rights owners listed on the Do Not Train Registry, and Spawning is working to obtain agreement from others.
- Amending your website terms and conditions to include a term expressly prohibiting the use of any automated programs, tools etc. to access and/or use its content. Further specific restrictions such as content download, scraping, indexing or caching could also be included. Depending on the factual circumstances, such terms could potentially be enforced against a website user breaching them (i.e.: against the party responsible for deploying and using the relevant program or tool in breach).
- Checking Spawning’s Have I Been Trained website to see whether your work has been used by well-known AI developers. You cannot remove your work from an existing dataset, but you can take steps, such as the ones listed above, to avoid your work being used in future.
Summary
Copyright is the bedrock of our creative industries. It encourages creativity and fuels innovation. It is important to recognise that both, the right system of copyright protection, as well as embracing AI, can bring in significant economic benefits in terms of growth, new job opportunities, and an improved standard of living. A careful approach needs to be taken in supporting AI development in order to ensure it is responsible and proportionate, and that its use does not replace or discourage human participation in the key parts of our society, the success of which is driven by our unique creativity, communication and collaboration.
Reaching the right balance in terms of the legal framework, whilst recognising the associated benefits and risks, is challenging. It is a live debate involving governments, creatives, the tech industry and the legal sector across the world. The UK’s existing copyright laws do not adequately address the issues since they long predate the development and widespread use of AI.
We are eagerly awaiting the Government’s decisions following its Consultation on Copyright and AI which will have a profound impact on both the UK’s contribution to AI development and the future of our creative industries, and we will update our comments in due course.
For those concerned about how their work is being used or the impact of any rule changes, speaking to copyright solicitors like ours can help clarify your rights and help you understand the steps you can take to protect your works.
