The Second British Invasion: Dylan Jones in Standard News Calls Out the UK Government for “Selling the Creative Industries Down the River” by supporting AI theft
Copyright is a life raft in the Sea of Narcissism with its headwaters in Silicon Valley. When Big Tech (and I do mean BIG) looks at copyright, they see it as they have always done: A barrier between their bank accounts and even vaster riches than they have already fleeced from the world. This time it’s not copyright theft through piracy online–this time it’s AI training and the rabid drooling is rather like Hitler must have looked when fixing his beady eyes on a map of Central Europe circa 1938. And just like the Munich Agreement, any “guardrails” for AI “agreed” by Big Tech isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, either.
In his remarkable editorial “AI is stealing from Britain’s creative industries – and Labour seems to believe that crime should be legal”, The Standard’s editor-at-large Dylan Jones makes a compelling case that the UK government has capitulated to the Biggest of Big Tech on AI:
Don’t look over your shoulder, but the government is selling the creative industries down the river. On December 17th, in the run-up to Christmas, when most people were busy celebrating, [UK Prime Minister] Keir Starmer stuck two fat fingers up [or his middle finger for US readers] at every artist, musician, writer and performer trying to earn a crust from their trade. That day, the government launched a consultation which outlined their preferred route regarding text and data mining, allowing AI companies to train on copyright material unless rights are expressly reserved (by machine readable format) despite the fact that there is no workable method of doing that. The Government is planning to allow big tech firms to ignore traditional copyright rules when training their AI systems.
This is the other shoe that we identified in December 23 from the words of Eric Schmidt during an Axios conference in DC:
So far we are on a win, the taste of winning is there. If you look at the UK event which I was part of, the UK government took the bait, took the ideas, decided to lead, they’re very good at this, and they came out with very sensible guidelines. Because the US and UK have worked really well together—there’s a group within the National Security Council here that is particularly good at this, and they got it right, and that produced this EO which is I think is the longest EO in history, that says all aspects of our government are to be organized around this.
Mr. Jones offers evidence that Biggest Tech is a bi-partisan auctioneer. Not only did Schmidt get tech-fan-boy Rishi Sunak (the last Prime Minister) to “take the bait”, he’s now gotten a completely opposite political party to do the same as evidenced by the Labour consultation on just how bad they want to screw us. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, just like the 2006 “global licensing” scheme in France that ultimately failed, what starts in the UK doesn’t stay in the UK.