In an open letter addressed to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, more than 400 of the UK’s most celebrated artists and creative leaders, including Elton John, Coldplay, Dua Lipa, Paul McCartney, and Shakespeare’s Globe, urged the UK Parliament to protect copyright, ‘the lifeblood of the creative industries.’ The icons expressed their support for an amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill that could have reshaped the relationship between the creative industries and AI developers by requiring AI companies to disclose which copyrighted works have been used to train their models.
Initially, the UK House of Lords listened, agreeing to the amendment. However, when the Bill returned to the House of Commons, the amendment was stripped from the legislation by the (unexpected) invocation of a mechanism called ‘financial privilege‘ (see Hansard from the House of Commons, dated 14 May 2025, here). Now, once again, the future of copyright in the age of AI is unclear in the UK.
Australia is actively considering similar issues around transparency, although the discussions in Australia remain at a relatively nascent stage. Recent consultations revealed broad, but cautious, support among stakeholders for transparency measures. However, the extent and nature of this support may be influenced by the evolution of other areas of copyright law, such as the allocation of liability for AI-generated content. It may be that these issues will be addressed outside the copyright framework as part of efforts to drive greater transparency around the use of AI more generally. No doubt Australian lawmakers will continue to keep a close eye on developments in the UK and other jurisdictions, in order to inform the regulatory approach down under.
Act 1 – Call time
The open letter urged the UK Parliament to support an amendment proposed by Baroness Kidron which would require AI firms to publish information about the text and data used in the pre-training, training, fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented generation in their models. This ‘transparency requirement’ is designed to provide mechanisms for copyright owners to identify their works within these datasets and to ensure that creators are not left in the dark about how their intellectual property is being utilised by powerful AI systems.
The creative industries are a cornerstone of the UK economy, employing thousands of people and contributing over £120 billion annually (as published in the UK Government’s consultation paper ‘Copyright and Artificial Intelligence’, published 17 December 2024, available here). The letter’s signatories warned that without robust protections, the UK risks ‘giving our work away at the behest of a handful of powerful overseas tech companies,’ undermining both future income for creators and the UK’s status as a global creative powerhouse. Signatories argued that the transparency requirement would foster a dynamic and competitive market for high-quality AI training data — positioning the UK as a leader in the global AI supply chain.
Act 2 – Setting the stage
The call for a transparency requirement would not have come as a shock to the UK Government, which has previously indicated general support for transparency measures. In the consultation paper ‘Copyright and Artificial Intelligence’, the UK Government recognised that that rights holders are finding it difficult to control the use of their works in training AI models and AI developers are struggling to navigate copyright law. The UK Government accepted that the ‘status quo cannot continue’ given both the creative industries and AI sector are ‘UK strengths’. The UK Government proposed to introduce an ‘opt-out’ system, where AI companies could use copyrighted works unless creators explicitly objected – which we note, as an aside, has faced fierce opposition from creators, who argue it places an unfair burden on them and could lead to widespread, uncompensated use of their work. The UK Government stated that for the ‘opt-out’ approach to work, ‘greater transparency from AI developers is a prerequisite – transparency about the material they use to train models, how they acquire it, and about the content generated by their models.’
While not necessarily sold on the ‘opt-out’ model, in debating the transparency requirement proposed by Baroness Kidron, a number of members of the House of Lords indicated that increased transparency was a necessary precursor for any future reform in this area. For example, Lord Black of Brentwood, a conservative peer of Baroness Kidron, commented that in lieu of making a ‘rash decision on copyright law’, transparency is ‘feasible and necessary now.’ Lord Brennan of Canton, former MP and Labour peer, similarly commented that transparency will ‘unlock tremendous economic growth‘ and it is ‘never “too soon” to protect millions of workers and defend our national interest.’
Act 3 – A premature debut
Notwithstanding the comments above, the House of Lords was not unanimous in its support for the transparency requirement, with some members raising concerns about its practical implications. Baroness Jones of Whitchurch indicated her general support for transparency, but noted that a significant proportion of material on the internet does not have clear metadata to allow businesses to meet the transparency requirement. Consequently, in circumstances where an impact assessment has not been done, there is a risk that the transparency requirement could discourage AI innovators from developing and providing services in the UK. Lord Tarassenko made a similar point, and has provided interesting statistics on the point:
‘In the UK, unlike in the US, there is no copyright database. Usually, the copyright rests with the author of the work, but there are exceptions, such as when a work is created by an employee in the course of their job, and copyright may also be assigned or transferred to a third party. If we assume, generously, that it might take just one second, on average, to ascertain the copyright status of an article, book, image, or audio or video recording, on the web, it would require 31 years and eight months to check the copyright status of the 1 billion data points in a typical LLM training set—never mind thinking about setting up licensing deals with the millions of rights holders. For the distilled models that are now, as I explained, being trained or fine-tuned by UK developers, which are 100 times smaller, the copyright status check would still require one-third of a year—still an entirely unworkable proposition.’
Baroness Stowell of Beeston queried whether the transparency requirement is a ‘little bit too prescriptive for primary legislation ahead of a policy decision on the solution for how to uphold copyright.’
Act 4 – The story arc
While the transparency requirement was passed in the House of Lords, it has ultimately been stripped from the legislation, following the Chair of the House of Commons’ decision to invoke the rarely used ‘financial privilege’ during the later ‘Ping Pong’ stage of the Bill (during which Bills may pass to and from both Houses). The Government justified the decision on the basis that the amendment would require a system of enforcement, and any system of enforcement would be likely to require expenditure (see Hansard, here). The decision to use the financial privilege mechanism to prevent the transparency requirement passing has confused some, and as Mr Wishart (Scottish National Party) remarked in the House of Commons (see Hansard, here):
‘Today has been a curious day, too, because financial privilege has been invoked for a particular amendment. In my almost quarter of a century in this House, I have never seen that before. I think I know why it has been done: it is to ensure that the House of Lords does not get another opportunity to bring this measure back.’
The consequence is that the status quo prevails for now. It remains to be seen whether definitive action will be taken to address the concerns of the creators. Although the scene was initially set in favour of the creators, it seems the creators may struggle to get the certainty they are asking for – at least in the short term.
Act 5 – Palette of perspectives – Australia’s view
Australia is also grappling with many of the same issues as the UK. Late last year, the Australian Attorney-General’s Department released a discussion paper on copyright and AI transparency issues to participants in Australia’s Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Reference Group (CAIRG). Responses revealed that there is general support across creative, broadcasting, technology, academic, education and legal groups for transparency requirements relating to copyright material used in AI. These groups see transparency as a necessary step towards fair remuneration and rights management. However, there is debate over the breadth and timing of such obligations.
The technology sector’s support for transparency obligations was conditional on any transparency obligation being narrowly framed to require only high-level disclosure (e.g. a summary) and being related to use of AI systems, rather than development of AI systems. Echoing the dissident voices in the UK Lords Chamber, some stakeholders in Australia have raised concerns about the potential commercial impacts of overly broad or indiscriminate transparency obligations.
Also, Australia is still considering whether to introduce transparency requirements before or after clarifying foundational issues such as copyright subsistence in AI-generated works and liability for infringement. The Australian government has noted that exploring copyright-related transparency issues before considering other related issues may not be the appropriate ‘way of sequencing’ reforms, particularly given views on transparency obligations may ‘reasonably differ’ depending on how other aspects of copyright law evolve. In recognition of this issue, the Australian government stated:
‘For instance, a developer or deployer may consider a potential transparency requirement in a different light depending on whether compliance with the requirement requires it to disclose information that exposes it to a risk of liability for copyright infringement, or is a precondition for eligibility for some form of protection against liability for copyright infringement.’
Ultimately, the Australian debate reflects a consensus that transparency is vital, but must be carefully integrated with broader copyright reforms. Australia may well follow the UK’s lead in attempting to implement transparency requirements through separate, economy-wide legislation, rather than through amendments to the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), with CAIRG participants generally supporting that approach. However, the timeframe within which we may see these developments take shape in Australia is not clear. The recent failed attempts to implement transparency requirements in the UK may discourage Australia from auditioning a similar requirement in the immediate future.
Featured image: Pete Linforth, Pixabay, CC0.
