UK government consultation on AI and copyright
The UK government has consulted on AI regulation, including a proposal to introduce a “text and data mining (TDM) exception” to copyright law. This would allow AI companies to use musicians’ and composers’ work without permission, royalties, or licence fees.
The consultation closed on Tuesday 25 February 2025. The Ivors Academy responded and provided members with a guide to submit their responses.
Write to your MP
MPs need to hear from their constituents about the importance of safeguarding copyright and protecting the creative industries.
Write to your MP and call on them to:
- Protect creative rights
- Write to government ministers about this critical issue
A strong response from the creative community will send a clear message: we oppose weakening copyright protections for the benefit of AI companies and demand that our rights are upheld.
What is Text and Data Mining?
Text and data mining is a technique used by AI companies to analyse content on the internet and gather this data for ingestion into AI models to create and train them. This is often done by web-scrapers which crawl the web for content to ingest which is then analysed for patterns and insights that can be used to train AI models.
Under current UK law, AI companies need to license your work if they want to use text and data mining for commercial purposes.
