UK Music has undertaken extensive consultation with its members from across the music industry and leading thinkers on artificial intelligence (AI) to develop a position paper.
Recent advances in AI have been as rapid as they have been transformative for all areas of modern society – creating opportunities and challenges like any technological development.
The music industry are already taking advantage of artificial intelligence. As a tool it can be used in assisting creative endeavours, mastering recorded performance, improving sound, as well as providing useful insights into fan engagement. Music publishers and record companies use AI to assist with administration and enforcement operations.
However, as the Government considers how to regulate AI, the UK music industry believes policymakers should adopt five key principles:
- Creators’ choice: The creator, or their chosen rights holder, should be able to decide if
and how they want to use their creative talent. This certainty underpinned by legal rights
(copyright) should not be undermined by any exception to copyright or compulsory
licensing during the input stage. Users need to respect creator’s choice as baseline for
any discussions. - Record keeping: It is important that in the input stage, the tech providers keep an
auditable record of the music ingested before the algorithm generates new music. This is
the only point in the process when these data points can be documented. - Human creativity: Without human creativity there should be no copyright.
- Labelling: Music generated by AI should be labelled as such.
- Protection of personality rights: A new personality right should be created to protect the personality/image of songwriters and artists.
We look forward to building a closer dialogue between the creative and technology sectors to establish a clear legal framework for building safe business models for the future. We welcome UK Government playing a key role in facilitating channels for communication.
If you want to find out more about these key principles and the policy we’re asking the Government to implement read the paper here.
