Contribution
I shall make a very brief speech. I stood up when the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, stood up, but unfortunately, as so often in my life, he completely ignored me, so I will just slip in after him and just before our Front Bench. I declare my interest in the register as an adviser to ProRata.ai, which is a company that seeks to pay royalties to creatives for the use of their content in AI models. It was good to see not only the Secretary of State, Peter Kyle, standing at the Bar, but also the Creative Industries Minister, Chris Bryant, which shows that something is up. They were very clearly wanting to be seen by the 400 or so creatives who wrote to the newspapers over the weekend expressing their concerns about the Government’s AI legislation and also to seek, as we all do, to curry favour with the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, who has led so well on so many of these issues.
As she was speaking and making the point that creatives and technologists are not apart at all, but are together, it reminded me that I became the Technology Minister in the Cameron Government because I was the Creative Industries Minister, and the reason I became the Technology Minister was because I was the only Minister in the Cameron Government in 2010 meeting the technology companies. The reason I was meeting the technology companies was because the technology companies were busily ripping off the intellectual property of the creative industries. At that time, in 2010, you would sit down with Google and say, “Anyone can search for any material on your website, come up with it illegally, stream it and download it without paying the creators of that material. What are you going to do about it?” Of course, they said, “We’re going to do absolutely nothing because you are just a little British Minister, and we only do what the White House tells us to do”.
The Labour Government had passed legislation that was concluded in the wash-up in 2010 that effectively criminalised, to coin a phrase, the teenager in their bedroom downloading music, just as perhaps some of us as teenagers might have taped music off the radio in the past. I knew when I became a Minister that that legislation was completely unworkable. It was pointless to be prosecuting teenagers when you should be taking on big tech. Actually, the music industry found a solution by using the Fraud Act and began to take action in the courts against websites that were completely ripping off IP. It allowed courts to order those websites to be blocked.
I also knew that there would be no solution until there was a commercial solution. In fact, that commercial solution has come about. In 2010, people were predicting the entire death of intellectual property, the death of the music industry, the death of the film industry and the death of television. They have never been healthier: there are commercial models because more people are prepared to pay a subscription to Spotify, Netflix or Amazon Prime to get great content for a reasonable price, so a commercial solution is possible when people work together.
It was interesting to hear the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, talking about the opt-out model because it implies that you can have a conversation between big tech and creatives. The creatives can either opt out or opt in. We referred earlier to licensing deals. If anyone reads FT Weekend—in fact, everyone in this Chamber obviously reads FT Weekend as it is the Bible of the chattering classes—Sam Altman from OpenAI was featured in “Lunch with the FT”, an honour he shares with the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. In fact, I texted her when she was in “Lunch with the FT” and said that it is better than a peerage. At the beginning of that lunch, it says that the FT has a licensing deal with OpenAI, so it is possible to have licensing deals.
What I think none of us can really stand is the utter hypocrisy of people saying that, for the national interest, we have to rip off intellectual property. It is completely hypocritical and nonsensical. You would not find a single tech chief saying, “I think it is fine if people take our patents because that is how you get economic growth. Just take my patent”. In fact, you will not find a CEO saying that. You will see them saying in court, “He’s ripped off my patent, and I want my money back”. That is intellectual property that big tech is prepared to fight for, yet big tech is still prepared to tell us, just as they told us 15 years ago, that they can grow only by ripping off the IP of the creative industries. Let us face it: there may be AI start-ups that need open source. I totally accept that. It is a complicated landscape, but we are still talking about big tech. We are talking about Microsoft, OpenAI, xAI and Meta. We are talking about the role of the United States. Donald Trump wants to make Hollywood great again. This is where he could start.