Fittingly for a Saturday snack, there are several smaller pieces of news I want to round up. Here in the UK, the public consultation on AI copyright has just finished, and the Publishers Association’s Dan Conway has been vocal on what he thinks needs to happen. A quotation in The Times includes fighting talk such as, “The message to government is clear: the great copyright heist cannot go unchallenged…Big Tech needs to pay for the creative and research content they hoover up to train AI.”
ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
Also in The Times is a letter from the great and the good of the creative industry, entitled Protecting UK’s Creative Copyright Against AI.
The focus of the letter is on the financial benefit to the wider economy of the creative industries and the damage that what the signatories see as the failure to protect copyright would do.
And letters are not the only form of protest creative celebrities have engaged in. On the same day as the letter, 1,000 musicians released an album titled “Is This What We Want?” Many of the musicians most prominently behind the album were at their peak influence in the 1990s, which makes it fitting that the playlist feels like a piece of conceptual art. It comprises twelve one-word titles that spell out the message, “The British government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies.” The whole album is silent.
Having once witnessed an impromptu performance at the Barbican of John Cage’s 4'33”, I can’t help wondering when tickets for the tour go on sale.
We wait to see whether that or an informative government response comes first.
Meanwhile, an interesting development in the world of academic libraries, which is not something I often report on, despite the fact that academic publishing is by far the most lucrative and revenue-intensive part of the publishing world. But this is interesting because it illustrates just how far trends are changing. Several major players in supplying libraries with academic titles are moving from an ownership to a subscription model for accessing research in e-book format. This means libraries will not be able to own or guarantee continued access to digital resources.
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