Baroness Kidron (CB)

My Lords, last week, we had a decisive vote in favour of transparency for UK copyright holders—a first step towards protecting the labour and property of UK creators and creative businesses. Sadly, despite powerful interventions in the other place from all sides, including the Government Benches, those provisions were overturned on the basis of financial privilege. Members of your Lordships’ House are rightly mindful of the primacy of the elected Chamber, so today I speak to Amendment 49D in lieu, which accepts the Government’s report on the use of copyright works in the development of AI systems already enshrined in the Bill as the mechanism by which they will come to a view on how best to frame transparency measures, while also ensuring that clear, relevant, accurate and accessible information will be provided to copyright owners so that they can identify the use of their copyright works and the means by which those works were accessed. The amendment also takes at face value Statements made by Ministers at the Dispatch Box that creatives, UK AI companies and global brands will be in the room for discussions about copyright on no less a basis than Silicon Valley representatives. It accepts the Government’s will that they have free reign on enforcement procedures, so there are no financial commitments for enforcement as a result of this provision. However, the amendment does require the Government to bring forward transparency regulation within six months of the report being completed. The Government have three times rejected my more comprehensive drafting, but they have also failed to bring forth something of their own. The amendment before us was drafted by an eminent lawyer with the very helpful support of the Public Bill Office. If the Government are not willing to accept a time-limited outcome of their own report, we must ask again if the report is simply a political gesture to push tackling wide-spread theft of UK copyright into the long grass. In the real world, failing to accept a timeline means starving UK industries of the transparency they need to survive. Ministers talk about balancing the interests of AI and creative companies, as if that is reasonable. Not only are they failing to listen to UK AI companies, but the idea is a little extraordinary. No other industrial sector in the UK is required by government policy to give its property or labour to another sector that is in direct competition with it, on a compulsory basis, in the name of balance. The Government should have leapt at this opportunity to save a much-valued and valuable UK industrial sector, central to their own industrial strategy, but they have not. The amendment before us would provide certainty that a transparency regime will be forthcoming within 18 months of Royal Assent and would signal once and for all that UK copyright law is indeed the law of the land, a fact that has now been confirmed, under duress, by Ministers at the Dispatch Box, but still they have taken no action to defend it. This combination, giving creators, and by extension the courts, the information they need to enforce the law is the minimum viable action from the Government if we are to believe their warm words about the value of the creative sector. What you cannot see, you cannot enforce. The amendment would allow UK copyright owners to police their own property, leaving the Government to consider further legislative issues in a process that even Government Ministers admit may bear no fruit until the end of the decade. We have had compelling speeches at each stage of our debate and, I must say, some notable acts of resistance and support, and I am deeply grateful for all of them. Undermining copyright is a multigenerational harm because copyright not only supports today’s creators but is essential to create opportunities for the creators of the future. I want to put on record that young people refute the suggestion that emanates from government that everything is already stolen. Not only do models constantly need to be retrained, fine-tuned or augmented with up-to-date information but some people have not yet started their creative journey and some things remain to be created. It is our duty as parliamentarians to ensure that we do not squander the future of the young. The amendment protects property rights of UK citizens and creative corporations. It asserts the right for any worker, including a creative worker, to be paid for their labour. It is also about coherence of policy. Why change benefits or implement new workers’ rights if at the same time the Government undermine copyright in the creative industry, which acts as sick pay, pension and wages across a £126 billion industrial sector? The Government have got it wrong. They have been turned by the sweet whisperings of Silicon Valley, which has stolen—and continues to steal every day we take no action—the UK’s extraordinary, beautiful and valuable creative output. Silicon Valley has persuaded the Government that it is easier to redefine “theft” than make it pay for what it stole. This amendment recognises the primacy of the elected House, and I urge all noble Lords, from all Benches, whatever their allegiance and whatever their whip, to stand behind our creative industries and our indigenous AI community. I have tried everything to persuade the Government in private—everything. If the Government continue on their current intransient path with no meaningful alternatives, we will begin to see the corrosion of our powerful industry—an industry fundamental to country and democracy. It will be a tragedy, and it is entirely avoidable. It is a choice that the Government and we in this House can make today. The UK creative industries embody our history, they hold our shared truth and tell our national story. A nation with a contested story is a troubled nation. A nation that gives away its capacity to tell its own story is a fragile place indeed. I beg to move.