Artist Protest Album, ICLE Comment Highlight Debate Over UK Copyright Consultation on AI

Yesterday, a group of 1,000 UK musicians, including popular artists such as Imogen Heap, Kate Bush and Annie Lennox, released an album titled “Is This What We Want?” in protest to the UK government’s announcement in December 2024 of a consultation on copyright and AI, which is considering exceptions to copyright infringement liability for some artificial intelligence (AI) purposes, including training AI models. In stark counterpoint to the musicians’ concerns about their economic livelihood is a comment filed the same day by the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE), which argues that reservation-of-rights approaches favored by many creator advocates hinders new modes of monetization for artists that could be enabled by AI technologies.

Protesting Musicians Fear Loss of Economic Livelihood Due to Generative AI

As the official website for the protest album explains, the unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train AI models would be deleterious to the livelihood of musicians who rely upon licensing revenues. The protest album features 12 tracks, each about four minutes in length, representing the sounds of empty studios and performance spaces that the musicians believe will result from the copyright exceptions for AI training. Each of the album’s tracks has a one-word title that, taken together, reads, “The British Government Must Not Legalise Music Theft To Benefit AI Companies.”

According to news reports, the silent protest album was organized by British composer and technologist Ed Newton-Rex, a generative AI advocate who previously resigned from generative AI developer Stability AI over that company’s fair use stance. This silent album is merely the latest protest from members of the global creative class, who have filed legal actions and raised public appeals over concerns that AI models trained on their works would create infringing outputs, harming the economic prospects of the artists by enabling consumers or other artists to generate new music resembling the artists’.

ICLE’s comment to the UK government’s official consultation on copyright and AI acknowledges that there are tradeoffs policymakers must make to protect the rights of copyright owners. However, ICLE argues that the consultation is too focused on reserving the rights of copyright owners before their works become inputs, missing the nascent yet broader market served by AI outputs that could go far in supporting the long-term interests of the protesting creators.

There is a fundamental tension underpinning copyright law between the commercial interests of creators and the societal interests in enabling widespread distribution and creative reuse, ICLE notes. This tension gives copyright law a hydraulic nature by which stronger creators’ rights often limit the market-creating impacts of new technologies like AI.

Strengthening Creators’ Rights Against Infringing AI Outputs is Better Approach

Currently proposed input-focused licensing regimes are not properly aligned with the purposes of copyright law in two critical ways, ICLE contends. First, expressing similar ideas in new ways does not trigger copyright liability, and the many good-faith arguments made regarding the fair use doctrine’s applicability to AI model training makes it unclear exactly how traditional copyright principles will be applied to generative AI. Second, the time and administrative overhead involved with licensing individual works used as inputs would make it prohibitively expensive to develop large language models (LLM), while compulsory licensing regimes could risk creating an industry monopoly.

When considering the reservation-of-rights approach proposed by the UK government, giving copyright owners a right to reject the use of their works as AI inputs arguably exceeds the traditional protections of copyright. ICLE notes that AI systems don’t make true copies of works but rather analyze the statistical relationships between chunks of text, so the original text is never stored as a readable copy. Further, the difficulty of assigning value to works at the input stage means that any per-work fee would not fairly compensate the value of each work to the AI model’s outputs, even if the total licensing cost were not astronomically high.

Instead, ICLE argues that the UK government should focus on an approach that strengthens the rights of creators regarding AI-generated outputs resembling their works. Such an approach would encourage the development of AI technologies while promoting the creation of new works, which better balances interests under copyright law. The advent of name, image and likeness rights, as well as revenue-sharing mechanisms for AI outputs that are substantially similar to copyrighted works, provide avenues for reinforcing the rights of creators without hampering AI innovation.

Both the silent protest album and the ICLE’s comment were published on the final day that the UK government is accepting public input on its consultation into copyright and AI issues. Given the UK government’s goal of supporting the domestic development of world-leading AI models, it’s likely any concrete changes to copyright law might closely resemble the AI monetization approach supported by ICLE rather than the complete ban on the use of copyrighted works sought by protesting musicians.