Baroness Freeman of Steventon (CB)

My Lords, I rise briefly to support these important clauses. I declare my interests as I hold copyright as a filmmaker and writer. Copyright and IP exist to assert ownership over creative works and protect the interests of creators. This is fundamental to supporting people whose job it is to have ideas, be creative and innovate in a range of different ways. Undermining this and allowing major breaches of that protection risks undermining the whole basis of innovation and creativity within a society, and that cannot be done lightly. Creators of generative AI models claim that they “need” more and more materials to train their models on, including materials that are the creative works of others—just as, until last week, they had claimed that they needed more and more of the latest chips. We should ask ourselves very seriously why they need these copyright-protected works. What use-cases are there for models that have been trained on copyrighted works that would not be possible with models trained on public-domain materials and works for which the rights have been properly obtained?