Britain’s creatives forced a retreat on AI copyright — Australia should pay attention

If a government wants to relax copyright rules for AI firms, it may be wise to check whether Kylie Minogue is available. Britain found that a policy presented as modernisation can look rather less polished once celebrities, writers and musicians decide to make noise in public.

The UK government had planned to let AI companies train on copyright-protected material unless creators opted out in advance. That idea did not survive a campaign that was as political as it was theatrical, with Sir Elton John, Sir Paul McCartney, Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus, Julianne Moore and Thom Yorke helping to drag the issue out of the policy bunker and into newspapers, broadcast bulletins and social media.

The famous names mattered, but they were not the whole story. Beeban Kidron, a member of the UK’s upper house and an award-winning film director, pushed amendments that would have killed the proposal and helped organise the celebrity opposition around them. She said people care about the songs, books and pictures that shape the critical moments of their lives, and polling suggested she was not speaking into the void: seven in 10 adults in the UK backed paying royalties to copyright holders whose work had been used to train AI models.

Ed Newton-Rex, a composer and former AI executive, gave the campaign its more inventive edge. He organised Is This What We Want?, a silent album built from recordings of empty music studios and performance spaces, backed by more than 1,000 musicians including Damon Albarn, Kate Bush and Annie Lennox. He also helped create Don’t Steal This Book, an otherwise empty paperback bearing the names of 10,000 writers, among them Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory and Richard Osman. His argument was blunt enough to survive contact with reality: AI companies should pay for the content they use, and the government only had to notice public reaction for that to become obvious.

That is the warning for Australia, where the government is considering its own copyright approach. Pierre Andrews, a former culture-policy adviser under Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government, said the British Labour government made the mistake of assuming it could persuade the creative industries to accept the plan. Instead, artists and authors saw betrayal from a party they had expected to be on their side, which is usually where political trouble begins.

The tech industry still prefers the language of a win-win outcome: domestic AI companies train models on copyright-protected content, rights holders are compensated, everyone applauds politely. Antony Walker of techUK said the government had not framed the consultation well, though he also said rights holders were highly effective at shutting down the debate and making it one-sided. In March, then technology secretary Liz Kendall said the key proposal — letting tech firms train on protected material unless artists opted out beforehand — was no longer the government’s preferred option.

A new policy has yet to be set out, which leaves Australia with a fairly plain choice. It can treat copyright as a technical detail to be managed by officials, or it can remember that creative work is not just another input for the algorithmic machine. Britain tried the first route and found, to its cost, that once the public notices what is being taken, consultation is a poor substitute for consent.

Written by Freya Stensrud freya.stensrud@alpineweekly.com