Media News

FT warns UK government about AI exemptions

February 5, 2025

Posted by Chris Roush

Preserving copyright protections for news publishers against theft by artificial intelligence companies is “a question of right and wrong,” the policy chief at the Financial Times says.

Bron Maher of Press Gazette reports, “Matt Rogerson, director of global public policy and platform strategy at the FT and the former Guardian Media Group director of public policy, said watering down UK copyright law to help AI companies gather content to train large language models (LLMs) would be ‘a huge mistake.’

“The UK government is currently consulting on proposals to introduce an ‘opt-out’ copyright regime for AI companies which would automatically permit the tech businesses to scrape publisher and creatives’ content from the web unless those rightsholders explicitly forbade it.

“Last week the House of Lords passed amendments to the Data (Use and Access) Bill that would explicitly subject AI companies to UK copyright law no matter where in the world they are and would reveal the names and owners of web crawlers.”

Read more here.

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