Ministers from Keir Starmer’s Labour government in the U.K. met with members of Parliament this week to offer concessions on the proposed Data (Use and Access) Bill in a bid to speed passage or the measure. The government offered to commit to conducting an economic impact assessment of the bill’s proposed reforms, as well as a separate report on the reforms’ technical feasibility. According to The Times, however, peers and members were not impressed with the offer, with Liberal Democrat digital spokesperson, Lord Timothy Clement-Jones calling it “a bit of a pig in a poke.”

Among other things, the bill would amend U.K. copyright law to allow the use of copyrighted works without the permission of the rightsholder to train AI models, while providing an option for rights owners to affirmatively “opt-out” of allowing their works to be used. The government considers the bill critical to maintaining Britain’s technological competitiveness with the European Union, which included a similar text-and-data mining (TDM) exemption and opt-out provision in the AI Act.

But the copyright provisions in the U.K. bill have drawn sharp criticism from members of the U.K. creative industries, including from such luminaries as Sir Paul McCartney, and their objections have attracted champions in both houses of Parliament. Peers in the House of Lords last month added amendments to the bill intended to better protect the creative industries, including enhanced data transparency requirements on AI companies, but the government stripped out those measures when the bill was sent to the House of Commons.

The concessions offered by the government this week were intended to short-circuit parliamentary “ping-pong,” that could delay final passage.

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Adding fuel to the increasingly heated debate, the Tony Blain Institute for Global Change headed by the former prime minister this week published a report arguing that enforcement of overly strict copyright laws risks straining trans-Atlantic relations and could drive AI companies out of Great Britain. “The current US administration has indicated that it will not pursue strict AI regulations – and views attempts by other countries to do so as anti-competitive,” the report says.

The Data Bill is part of a broad initiative by the Starmer government to bolster the U.K.’s technological strengths amid the global race for preeminence in the field of artificial intelligence. Several countries outside of Europe, including Japan, Korea and Singapore, have also recently adopted TDM exceptions to bolster domestic AI development, some of which, such as Singapore’s do not include a provision to allow rightsholders to opt-out.

Even where such a provision is included, as in the EU AI Act, critics have questioned the technical feasibility of enforcing an opt-out request. Former Stability AI executive Ed Newton-Rex, who led development of the company’s music-generator AI, Stable Music, has emerged as a vocal critic of the TDM-with-opt-out regime. He left Stability in 2023 over disagreement with the company’s position on the use of copyrighted works in AI training and has since launched London-based Fairly Trained, which certifies AI models trained on licensed or public domain data.

In interviews and op-eds, Newton-Rex has argued no technical means currently exist that can reliably prevent AI systems from crawling and scraping data from public sources, rendering opt-out provisions moot.

Source: The Times