Member

To deal with their amendments in order, the text tabled by the noble Viscount would add extra elements to the Government’s report, including a plan to reduce barriers to market entry for AI developers, the impact on UK copyright holders of extraterritorial uses of their work and technological standards for machine-readable watermarks. The amendments also further define which web crawlers and AI systems might be considered in scope. These amendments are designed to be constructive, and I thank the noble Viscount for the thought that he has put into them. I do, however, suggest that, in the main, they are already covered by the government amendment. He is a passionate advocate for a global digital watermarking scheme, and, as my noble friend Lord Vallance has said on previous occasions, there is certainly merit in those discussions taking place. However, as the noble Viscount would readily admit, this would need to be a global effort, and it would therefore not be for the UK Government to take unilateral action.