Data (Use and Access) Bill [Lords]

Caroline Dinenage Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Wednesday 14th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

As I am sure my hon. Friend is aware, the US system of fair use is different from the UK’s—ours goes back to 1709, with the first of our copyright Acts, and it has been very solid. When we introduced this Bill, I said that this country should be proud of the fact that a succession of different generations have ensured that rights holders can protect their copyright. Interestingly, one of Charles Dickens’ big battles was being able to protect his copyright not only in the UK but in the United States of America, where he felt he had fewer protections. It is for us to develop our own copyright law in our own country, and I say to my hon. Friend that the law as it is will not change one jot as a result of what we are intending to do in the Bill.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)]

rose—

[Pete Wishart (Perth and Kinross-shire) (SNP)]

rose—

[Chris Bryant]

I probably ought to give way first to the Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, and then to the hon. Gentleman.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

Yesterday the Minister appeared before our Select Committee and said, “The best kind of AI is the kind of AI that is built on premium content, and you can’t get premium content without paying for premium content.” Now, as well as being concerned about the overuse of the expression “premium content” in that sentence, I am also concerned about the fact that, as we speak, there are copyright works out there being scraped underhandedly by AI developers, some of whom are feigning licensing negotiations with the very rights holders whose works they are scraping. Surely now is the time to require developers to tell us what copyright works are being used to train their models and what their web-scraping bots are up to. Surely he agrees that Lords amendment 49 is a very good way to move this forward to see what works are being used to train AI models.

[Chris Bryant]

The first thing to say to the right hon. Lady is that I completely stand by everything I said to the Select Committee yesterday. I do believe that the best form of AI will be intelligent artificial intelligence. And just like any pipe, what comes out of it depends on what goes into it. If we have high-quality data going into AI, then it will produce high-quality data at the other end. I have spoken to quite a lot of publishing houses in the UK, including Taylor & Francis in particular—

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant]

I completely agree with everything my hon. Friend said, and I can give that guarantee. Interestingly, when we started this process after the general election, the first consultation meetings that the Under-Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Feryal Clark), and I had were with the creative industries in one room and the AI companies in another. Perhaps it would have been better to mix them up in the way my hon. Friend has suggested, and that is precisely the job of work that I want to get on with.

We are determined that wherever we can, we will take creative industries with us, and we will be transparent about the work that we do. I want to lay to rest the idea that there are two Departments at war with one another. That simply is not the case. The two Departments are trying to work together to achieve good outcomes for everybody.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

The Minister is being unbelievably generous in taking interventions, but before he moves on, I wanted to say that it is really important to have those involved in AI and in the creative industries in the same room at the same time. He must not forget that the reason the creative industries are in such a state of panic and despair about this is because a hare was set running a few months ago by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, when it published an AI strategy that said that the copyright opt-out was a way to grow the AI industry. The Government then published their consultation, in which they indicated that the opt-out was their preferred mechanism, despite the fact that the document also mentioned prioritising transparency. I understand that, but the Minister must understand that panic has set in. Words matter; what we say matters. He needs to do everything that he can to bring this issue to a close.

[Chris Bryant]

As the hon. Lady knows, I am sympathetic to the direction of travel that she is trying to take me in. Some people will think that I am splitting hairs, and that is not my intention, but I have been keen to avoid the term “opt-out”. As I said, we have brought forward a package of measures. They were reliant on our being able to deliver greater control, through technical measures, for the creative industries and others who had rights to protect. That is why we referred to “rights reservation”, rather than “opt-out”. I take her point, and I am sure that we will be debating it for some considerable time. She is a Select Committee Chair, as is my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West (Chi Onwurah). I should have said earlier that when I was Chair of the Committee of Privileges, we produced a report, which has yet to be implemented or even discussed in the House, about how we could ensure that witnesses appeared before Parliament when Select Committee Chairs wanted them to.

If it is all right with the rest of the House, I will move on to further subjects. The issues around scientific research—I can never work out where the emphasis lies when I say the word “research”—are embodied in Lords amendment 43B. Some people have suggested that the Bill will somehow create a wild west for research, but that is simply not true. The Bill does not change the threshold for what constitutes scientific research; we are sticking with what has been and is a fair, clear and proportionate measure, using the “reasonableness test” that is common in other legislation and well known by the courts.

As Lord Vallance said in the House of Lords earlier this week, this amendment would go against the good work done by the previous Government on avoiding unnecessary red tape for researchers. We have a world-class research sector in the UK. We want to empower it, not tie it up in red tape. We believe that documents such as the Frascati manual, which are useful and interesting in other settings, are not designed to contain legally binding requirements, so the amendment is misplaced.

If the amendment were carried forward, researchers would need to be able to demonstrate their work’s creativity to a legal standard. If someone’s work is aimed at testing or reproducing another researcher’s results, is it truly creative? That is a legitimate question, but it takes on a whole new meaning, and brings a whole new layer of bureaucracy, when enforced to a new legal standard, as the Bill insists, backed up by the potential for huge regulatory fines.

Similar issues arise in relation to requirements for research to be “systematic” and “ethical”. Those words are not necessarily well known in the courts when it comes to this legislation. As Lord Winston argued powerfully on Monday, if the amendment had been law 50 years ago, we may never have had in vitro fertilisation and the benefits spinning off from that, including valuable cancer research. Those are the issues caused by putting such a test in a legally binding setting that it was never designed for.