Google has renewed its calls for ministers in the UK to relax AI copyright law.
Google has renewed its calls to UK ministers urging them to loosen AI copyright laws, claiming the restrictive rules will harm the economy.
The tech giant wants the government to change the law around AI copyright so that tech start-ups can scrape the internet for data to train their large language models (LLMs).
“When any company is building a data centre here, or indeed building an AI company here, the moment they want to train those LLMs, they have to go to a different jurisdiction,” Katie O’Donovan, Google’s UK head of public policy, told the Select Committee on Democracy and Digital Technologies on Monday.
This “puts a ceiling on the sophistication of our [UK] AI economy … That investment, that capacity, goes elsewhere”.
She said: “You start to think, increasingly, about how does the UK want to have an AI economy, in this quite competitive global environment?”
As it stands, the law in the UK prohibits using copyright material to train AI without permission or a licence. This came after the creative industry pushed back against their content being used by AI firms without credit or compensation.
Human made content is protected by copyright mechanisms, which tech firms and LLMs must have a license to use it.
The UK government has decided to wait and assess the workings of the copyright law against LLM practices rather than making exceptions for tech developers, instead choosing to focus on transparency and standardising rights.
O’Donovan argued that even if copyright protection was offered, much of the UK-published material is available for developing AI in the US – so the protection wouldn’t be universal.
However, Google is campaigning against the protections because they are restrictive, which suggests they are at least, a little effective.
Unfettered access to publisher content has been a pain point in the media industry since the advent of AI, with Google recently ordered by the CMA to offer a fairer deal to publishers after a significant drop in traffic has led to serious difficulties for publishers, content creators, and advertisers.
