On 25 February 2025, the UK Government closed a heated consultation on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence. It attracted over 11,000 responses. In the months that followed, the policy temperature on copyright and the training of AI models has continued to rise. Last week, on 7th May, the House of Commons rejected an amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill originally proposed by Baroness Beeban Kidron to ensure that AI companies “comply with UK copyright law”. A couple of days later, on 10th May, the Kidron amendments were backed by an open letter to the Prime Minister “to support UK creativity and economic growth by enforcing copyright law”, signed by famous artists including Dua Lipa, Elton John, Kate Bush and Kazuo Ishiguro. On Monday 12th May, on the first day of parliamentary “ping-pong”, the Lords reintroduced an amendment requiring the Secretary of State or Treasury to impose copyright-specific transparency obligations on AI companies.

At CREATe - the Centre for Regulation of the Creative Economy at the School of Law and the ARC, funded by the AHRC as UK research infrastructure - we encourage and facilitate reflection on the basis of evidence. Our response to the government consultation, openly available on our website, proposes a nuanced policy approach based on empirical evidence published or reviewed by CREATe as an independent national research centre. It includes reflections on transparency obligations and the original Kidron amendments to the Data (Use and Access) Bill (3.3. Transparency, p. 27 of the response).

Copyright and AI is a complex policy issue with significant stakes for the future of innovation and knowledge in the UK. Yet, it is just one contentious entry point into the intricacies of regulation of the creative economy, and more broadly of the digital sphere. In today’s extraordinarily complex legal and policy landscape, we can no longer look at digital regulation through traditional disciplinary standpoints in isolation. Last week, for example, at the 2025 International Competition Network (ICN) Annual Conference, we used competition law as the starting point to discuss wider regulatory questions. While we are anchored in the areas of intellectual property, competition, information and technology law, CREATe adopts mixed empirical methods from a variety of disciplines to address critical questions at the intersection of Creativity, Technology and Markets.

This week is a good time to visit our website and get a sense of the breadth of our interdisciplinary research and knowledge exchange activities. On our blog, you will find salon orchestra recordings that have not been heard since the 1930s, Stranger Things fan games powered by LLMs and a play review that reflects on legal aspects of repatriation and museums. In our Working Papers series, you can dive into three decades of empirical evidence on EU data protection law or explore regulatory innovations that respond to rapidly changing digital economies and geo-political winds, i.e. the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum. Or you can just browse through our projects to find out what we are up to– we are always open to interesting collaborations.

We are almost at the peak of a year full of exciting activities. We will reach the peak later this week, when we launch the second edition of our Summer School on (re)Humanising Creativity (15-20 May) and host the 9th Annual Conference of the European Copyright Society (16 May), currently chaired by our director Martin Kretschmer. The imaginative minds who defined copyright scholarship in the last decades will gather in Glasgow for a working conference on the regulatory aims of copyright law. No doubt they will address complex questions on copyright and AI with sophisticated and creative arguments. The CREATe team will be there to enjoy and contribute to this specialist discussion from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives.

Visit the CREATe website and find out more.

Illustration by Ilaria Urbinati for CopyrightUser.org. 

First published: 14 May 2025

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