Imagine if you will that you are sitting quietly in your house when you hear the door open. A man comes in and starts helping himself to your possessions. You remonstrate with him and he pays no attention. A quick phone call brings in the authorities but to your astonishment they arrive, ignore you, congratulate the thief and tell him that to incentivise him in his good work he will get a series of tax breaks.
It couldn’t happen here.
It is.
We are a publisher and recent months have seen a growing swell of complaints from our authors about theft of their texts without any permission. At least 7.5 million books without license or recompense into Artificial Intelligence systems, tens of millions of articles and shorter pieces. The action of the UK government is not to defend the intellectual copyrights and property of its citizens but to legislatively legitimise this theft with a generous dose of cream in tax breaks on top.
In our negotiations with the US (quite what one expects to negotiate with an administration who show utter contempt for the law baffles me as nothing will be worth the paper it is written on) it seems to me that one of the simplest techniques we have is to state to American tech businesses that we will uphold the law of the land and if they thieve then they will pay the price in a UK court. If they choose to ignore the judgement therein then their licenses to operate will be suspended. Theft is not and should not be the subject of debate. There are a number of interesting side effects to a tough line here. These companies depend on volume and aggregation of information. Deny them this and they are fatally weakened and compromised in their core mission. It is a powerful and unarguable tool. Property rights and their protection are at the heart of the reasons for a government. This is and should be non negotiable.
What purpose a government which chooses to surrender a central nexus of its very being?
I never know whether our MPs read Lib Dem Voice. I do hope that at least some of them do. When the knock comes at their door and the shadowy figures come in to take their most personal possessions at least they have been warned. Our society, our humanity, can only be rebuilt through ideas. Intellectual property is the haven within which ideas can build grow and develop. What price our future when those ideas are simply things to be stolen on creation?
* Hugh Andrew is Managing Director of Birlinn Ltd, one of Scotland's largest publishers. He served as Convenor of the Scottish Policy Committee.
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4 Comments
I work in publishing as a literary agent and I have written to my (Conservative) MP about this moral — and economic — outrage to point out that authors and other creatives are in danger of losing their livings if their financial interest in works they have created cannot be protected. I would hope all MPs are aware of this issue as, by extension, I consider our whole UK publishing industry (worth c£11bn) is under existential threat if authors’ copyright and moral rights become redundant. Some 180 countries agreed to mutually respect international copyright since the Berne Convention (1886) and now our government is effectively saying it is ok to bypass all this so US “big tech” can use (abuse) copyrighted texts for free?
I remember it wasn’t that long ago during the Napster file-sharing era that we told how important copyright was to protect creatives. Big business lobbied Governments to get them to change the law to allow them to prosecute ordinary people downloading music or video for free, and they told us it was stealing.
Now big business has found a new way to make money by stealing creative works from ordinary people, and they are lobbying Governments again to change the law to allow them to do it legally. In the meantime, they are carrying on doing it illegally anyway because it’s not really stealing if big business does it.
@Nick Baird that is a very good point.
As an academic, I completed the government consultation on this (it will be ignored). I am concerned about the content we produce – plagiarism was rife before AI – and it’s only going to get worse. The other group who need to worry are lawyers. Why would you pay a solicitor to draw up a contract or a will if you can get AI to do it for you? MPs won’t worry about musicians, authors or academics but, as many are ex-lawyers, they might worry about the issues for lawyers.