We’ve taken the unusual step of clearing the Leicester Mercury’s front page today to draw your attention to an issue that could be disastrous not just for local newspapers like the Mercury, and its website LeicestershireLive, but the UK’s entire creative sector.
Under changes to copyright laws being proposed by the Government, AI companies will be able to train their systems on text, images, music and any other online content without having to pay the creators of that content for gaining the ability to summarise, recreate or even directly replicate it.
That means that international AI corporations will be able to extract all the value from the work of everyone from artists and musicians to historians and scientists – as well as local journalists in our hard-working team here in Leicester.
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The creative industry is worth around £126bn, and employs around 2.4m people, and is today coming together to make it clear that these changes are potentially ruinous for the entire sector.
For a local news industry already being squeezed by the BBC’s digital expansion on one side and the market dominance of Meta and Google on the other, giving the AI industry free access to exploit our intellectual property would be catastrophic, stifling our ability to report on residents’ devastation over the recent floods in Great Glen, a reader’s heartbreak over the “appalling” way a hospital dealt with her mum’s death and how you will be impacted by the forthcoming massive reorganisation of councils in Leicestershire.
And it could also have a major knock-on effect for our local communities, putting significant pressure on arts venues and events here by significantly compromising the revenue streams that help fund them.
We stand with the UK’s outstanding creative industries to say it’s time to fairly compensate the creators, and to call on the Government to protect one of the country’s great natural resources.
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