An open letter to the UK government – signed by organisations including Creative Commons, Wikimedia UK, and Research Libraries UK – has urged the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) to clarify whether public and legally accessed data will be made available for AI training and analysis in its code of practice.

Now being drafted by an IPO working group, the government’s code of practice on copyright and AI is expected to come to fruition this autumn.

The Pro-innovation Regulation of Technologies Review, Digital Technologies report was accepted by Patrick Vallance in March.

The letter pointed out that while many countries have clarified their intellectual property laws to support AI and innovation, the UK has yet to introduce a text and data mining exception to “explicitly support knowledge transfer and commercial AI.”

Due to this, the signatories said that the code of practice would provide a “particularly important opportunity” to provide clarity and ensure that the UK remains an “attractive place to undertake and invest in machine learning.”

“As rights holders, researchers and innovators, we understand the importance of a well-functioning IP system which strikes an appropriate balance between protecting intellectual property rights and providing the necessary limits and exceptions to those rights, in order to ensure we have the right incentives to create, innovate and develop knowledge,” the letter read. “Even without an explicit commercial text and data mining exception, other exceptions and legal doctrines will allow for text and data mining on copyrighted works.”

The letter concluded that open access to public data would be a vital part of ensuring the safety goals established in the AI Safety Summit’s Bletchley Declaration are met.

The declaration, which was signed by representatives of 28 countries who attended the UK’s recent AI Safety Summit, including the US, China, and India, highlights the matter of avoiding catastrophe through the responsible deployment of AI systems and prioritises securing human rights and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Share Story: