Alison Hume

I am delighted to be called to speak on Report of the Data (Use and Access) Bill. I draw Members’ attention to my membership of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain. Before I entered this place, I worked as a freelance screenwriter, creating dramas for adults and children. I might add that children are the hardest audience to please—it used to be that we had five minutes to hook them, but now it is more like five seconds. Speed is the subject of my contribution today. I warmly welcome the Minister’s engagement on how best to protect our peerless creative industries. In that spirit, I am pleased to see new clauses 16 and 17 and the commitment to addressing the fundamental issue of transparency. At the moment, AI companies do not have to tell anyone what they are stealing from the internet, from whom they are stealing and why they are stealing it. Although I appreciate the Government’s position that they want more time, I worry that in the gap between this Bill becoming law and a new Bill that addresses transparency and copyright coming forward, everything that can be scraped will be scraped. Twelve months is a long time, and plenty of time for AI companies to continue crawling over original copyrighted material without a care in the world. For some parts of the creative industries, 12 months will be 12 months too long. Necessity is the mother of invention, and without a legal instruction for AI companies to reveal what they are using free of charge, there is surely no incentive for the AI industry to come up with the solutions to make it simple for original creators and collecting societies to assert their rights. New clauses 2 to 6 include calls for the operators of web crawlers and AI models to legally disclose what they are doing right now. Although I understand why the Government may not support the new clauses, will the Minister at least commit to placing a clear power to regulate in the Bill? The creative industries are nervous, spooked by the previously stated preference for an opt-out model, and such a move would calm nerves and indicate that the Government understand the pace at which the situation is developing and recognise the need for action. Recently, here in Westminster, Björn from ABBA spoke in favour of clear transparency. Perhaps the saddest ABBA song is “The Winner Takes It All”, inspired by break-ups in the band between the As and the Bs. We must ensure that this is not a divorce of two industries that leads to the creative partner being left with the equivalent of the coffee table and the dog. The tech industry needs us more than we need it, so it should be honest, tell us what it is doing behind our backs and pay up. When all is said and done, this Government need to send a message now that we have the backs of our creative industries and that legal protections are our absolute priority.