Member

62: After Clause 132, insert the following new Clause— “Transparency of crawler identity, purpose, and segmentation(1) The Secretary of State must by regulations make provision requiring operators of web crawlers and general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) models whose services have links with the United Kingdom within the meaning of section 4(5) of the Online Safety Act 2023 to disclose information regarding the identity of crawlers used by them or by third parties on their behalf, including but not limited to—(a) the name of the crawler,(b) the legal entity responsible for the crawler,(c) the specific purposes for which each crawler is used,(d) the legal entities to which operators provide data scraped by the crawlers they operate, and(e) a single point of contact to enable copyright owners to communicate with them and to lodge complaints about the use of their copyrighted works.(2) The information disclosed under subsection (1) must be available on an easily accessible platform and updated at the same time as any change.(3) The Secretary of State must by regulations make provision requiring operators of web crawlers and general-purpose AI models to deploy distinct crawlers for different purposes, including but not limited to—(a) web indexing for search engine results pages,(b) general-purpose AI model pre-training, and(c) retrieval-augmented generation.(4) The Secretary of State must by regulations make provision requiring operators of web crawlers and general-purpose AI models to ensure that the exclusion of a crawler by a copyright owner does not negatively impact the findability of the copyright owner’s content in a search engine.(5) The Secretary of State must lay before Parliament a draft of the statutory instrument containing regulations under this section within six months of the day on which this Act is passed and the regulations are subject to the affirmative procedure.”Member’s explanatory statement This amendment is part of a group of amendments that would clarify the requirement for web-crawlers and other “data gatherers” to observe UK copyright law. This amendment requires the SoS to set out strict transparency requirements for web crawlers so that it is possible for IP holders to identify the owners of webcrawlers.