As a UK electronic musician, who releases music, I am concerned about the march of AI development and the way it assumes it can scrape information, art, music and data to replicate/create its own 'versions' of music based on prompts.
The UK government is currently proposing a bill which would upend the current approach whereby copyright holders must provide permission for their works to be used (for any purpose), and introduce an exception for Music and art which would allow AI companies to scrape data without any permission.
I have written to my local MP using the text below, and thought that i would paste the text here, in case anyone wanted to use it to send to their MPs
If you don't know who your local MP is, and are in the UK, you can look them up here : https://members.parliament.uk/FindYourMP
the public consultation link is here https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/copyright-and-artificial-intelligence/copyright-and-artificial-intelligence
"Currently, developers are subject to copyright law when using large data sets to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. In December 2024, the government published proposals to change the way in which this material could be used. This included the establishment of a copyright exemption for AI developers and a new rights reservation model whereby copyright holders would need to opt-out from having their material used for training AI."
Personally I believe we should have an assumption of no permission UNLESS there is approval given, I do not support any proposal that would exempt AI companies from current copyright law.
Dear [Name of MP]
I am reaching out as [an electronic musician] concerned about the proposed bill around AI training data for Music (and art more generally),
it seems from what I've read that the government is proposing an opt out approach, so the burden of responsibility would be for artists, once their music/art is released would have to somehow instruct each company hosting their work, that that work should not be scraped for training data by AI companies.
The bill seems to challenge the current copyright law approach, which is based on permission having to be provided to allow use. And I understand it seems to be pushing down an approach which would switch this to being in a condition where permission is already presumed as granted.
I can't understand why we would not implement an Opt IN approach, whereby the artists and copyright holders would have to specifically allow their music/art to be used to train AI models, and not take the assumption that this permission has already been given.
I believe the burden needs to be on the AI companies to obtain permission from copyright owners FIRST, and not the other way around.
It's frankly unthinkable that a government could apply such an approach unilaterally, and in the inverse way. I assume this is because the AI companies have banded together to lobby for this. Clearly all copyright holders and musicians and artists are not able to do such a thing to lobby in the other direction, hence I am reaching out to you with the hope you will try to uphold our current copyright approach, without allowing the results of all artists work to help develop AI models without compensation or the right to refuse until it is too late.
Thank you for your support, and I would be interested to know what your position is on the bill.
Regards [Your name]