#HandsOffOurCopyright Open Letter
We wrote an urgent open letter that needs your attention (and signature)
So…if you work in the creative industry - whether you’re a painter, writer, photographer, poet etc - you might have heard but the UK government is about to throw our creative industry under the bus in the name of AI Opportunity Action Plan. They are currently proposing a broad copyright exemption for commercial generative AI training and a hugely unfair “opt-out” system. This is a very short-sighted plan and will have dire consequences for our society.
If you are still not quite sure what’s going on, here wonderful Christ Haughton has explain it brilliantly!
As you can imagine, my friends - Ged Ademson and Simona Ciaolo - and I were livid when we heard about the government’s consultation and what they were proposing to do. So we decide to shout and raise awareness and get as many creatives as possible to respond to the consultation. As a part of the campaign, we wrote an open letter!
Wednesday 12th February 2025:
We are some among the 2.4 million working in the UK creative industries. We are staring in astonishment at the sight of our own government making plans to do away with significant areas of our intellectual property rights, readying to hastily wrap our live’s work in attractive paper as a welcome gift to automated competitors.
Matt Clifford, venture capitalist turned government advisor, made the wish list of generative AI developers front and centre of the soon-to-be implemented AI Opportunity Action Plan. Clause 24 of the plan calls on the government to put an end to copyright protection as we know it and introduce an exception that would make our country a data-mining paradise for the ever more voracious generative AI industries.
If the plan is implemented as it is, it will be legal for AI companies to scrape everything we upload online, without licence or permission. They will be allowed to profit from the output of commercial AI products that would be trained, for free, on our copyrighted work. Their mission is to replace our work with their output. The livelihood of workers will become their profit.
The mechanism that is meant to balance the rights of creators against those of AI developers is an ‘opt-out’ option, the same mechanism that the EU tried, but failed, to implement. Opt-outs are universally considered unfair and unworkable by anyone who has looked into the matter objectively, including many in parliament. Moreover the burden of reserving the rights would fall on us, the creators, reversing the principle of automatic protection that underpins UK copyright law.
In an attempt to justify this indefensible transfer of value — from our industry, who produces it, to the one that wants to extract it — those who push for the reform have fabricated a rhetoric of ‘uncertainty in the law.’ This, regrettably, has been amplified through the media. MP Pete Wishart, voicing what we all know, recently said that the notion of current UK law being uncertain is just nonsense, adding that nobody actually believes it, that even AI companies wouldn’t say that there is any question surrounding that idea. Indeed the only issue that urgently needs to be remedied with new legislation is transparency: if AI companies can refuse to disclose the content of their datasets, any talk of fairness is farcical.
We stand beside our government in their effort to make our economy thrive and the United Kingdom a successful and welcome home for trailblazers. The creative industries are already a successful source of wealth for the nation, accounting for more than 5% of GDP and contributing 124 billion pounds of value to the economy. But they do more than that: they’re a source of pride, joy and wellbeing for the people of this country and the crown jewel of British soft power.
Subjecting our creative industries to the desires of Big Tech will boost neither growth nor innovation: unregulated tech is inherently extractive in nature and we run the risk of seeing it bleed our industries of the energy that comes from its grassroots in a reckless and unsustainable ‘slush-and-burn’ approach that sacrifices quality and our values for the sake of a quick buck.
Large language models are sensational in their capacity to imitate thought and human expression, but they don’t think, they can’t feel and they can’t question norms. Creativity remains, unquestionably, a human trait. Culture is a human artefact, our heritage was created collectively by the people and it should remain under their care.
The government has left a little window of time open for us to give our views: their public consultation on copyright and artificial Intelligence runs until the 25th of February. This is our last chance to express with urgency our concern and disagreement for the approach that has been proposed.
We are demanding transparency and a strong copyright regime that safeguards the livelihood of freelance workers and the vitality of human creativity.
The more signatures the better. Please share this as widely as possible to any creatives in any disciplines and get them add their names! We’re planning to get this letter published on a bigger platform so get involved!
Thank you,
Momo x
If you haven’t responded to the government’s AI & Copyright consultation yet, please do before 25th FEBRUARY. I know it looks tedious and intimidating with difficult words and many questions, but here is a great article on tips and tricks to respond to the consultation in no time!
Or you could write to your MP!
If you don’t want your hard work to be exploited by tech giants and other AI companies *for free*, get your voice heard by FILLING IN THE CONSULTATION BEFORE THE *25th of FEBRUARY*!
There are useful links on how to respond to the consultation in no time in my bio.
Also please spread the word!!!!