Meta's Massive AI Training Book Heist: What Authors Need to Know
March 20, 2025
Authors Guild Applauds U.K. Vote to Protect Works from Unauthorized AI Scraping
February 6, 2025
On Tuesday, January 28, the U.K. House of Lords voted to support copyright and creativity by passing legislative amendments requiring AI companies to “observe U.K. copyright law, reveal their identities and purpose, and let creatives know if their copyrighted works have been scraped.”
The vote was a response to—and a welcome victory against—a deeply troubling proposal by the current British government to create a new “data mining” exception to U.K. copyright law that would expressly permit AI companies to use any copyrighted work to train their AI models for free and without permission. The only right that authors and other copyright owners would retain would be to opt out of training by some affirmative action (and it is not clear how that could even be achieved).
Not surprisingly, the government’s proposal sparked outrage in the creator community (including from luminaries such as Paul McCartney and Elton John), and we were pleased to see it squarely rejected by the House last week. It is the opposite of what is needed and what the Guild has been fighting for—clear law that unauthorized training of AI models with professionally created works is presumptively infringing.
As we and others have consistently noted, copyright gives authors and other creators the right to decide whether, or under what terms, their works may be used by others. An opt-out system would turn that bedrock principle on its head, creating a presumption that tech companies can freely exploit these works for their own benefit, including to compete with people who created them. The AI companies suggest that copyright owners can simply use technical means, such as robots.txt,. to keep their works from being scraped by AI companies. But those technologies do not work well, are difficult and expensive to use in practice, and, of course, do nothing to address the fact that the books used to train AI were all scraped from pirate websites over which authors and publishers have no control. Passing this kind of exception would devastate the creative professions that are so vital to Britain’s economy and culture.
The U.K. government is simultaneously conducting a consultation process in which members of the public can submit comments on these issues through February 25. The Guild will be providing comments outlining our concerns in detail and urging the government to drop any further consideration of an opt-out system.