Together with partner organisation the PLUS Coalition, the IPTC has submitted a response to the UK Intellectual Property Office’s consultation on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence.      

Our position can be summarised as the following:

1. On behalf of our memberships, IPTC and PLUS respectfully suggest that existing UK copyright law is sufficient to enable licensing of content to AI platforms. There is no “fair use” provision in UK copyright law, and “fair dealing” does not cover commercial AI training. Existing copyright law should be enforced.
2. IPTC and PLUS Photo Metadata provide a technical means for expressing the creator’s intent as to whether their creations may be used in generative AI training data sets. This takes the form of metadata embedded in image and video files. This solution, in combination with other solutions such as the Text and Data Mining Reservation Protocol, could take the place of a formal licence agreement between parties, making an opt-in approach technically feasible and scalable.
3. It is true that our technical solutions would also be relevant if the UK government chooses to implement an “opt-out” approach similar to that adopted in the EU. However, an opt-out-based approach does not currently protect owners’ rights well, due to the routine activity of “metadata stripping” – removing important rights and accessibility metadata that is embedded in media files, in the misguided belief that it will improve site performance. Metadata stripping is performed by many publishers and publishing systems – often inadvertently. (See our research on metadata stripping by social media platforms from 2019; very little has changed since then)
4. As a result, we can only recommend that the UK adopts an opt-in approach. We request that the UK ensures metadata embedded in media files be declared as a core part of any technical mechanism to declare content owner’s desire for content to be included or excluded from training data sets.

During the course of this consultation, it has become clear that content creators are a core part of the UK economy and have a strong voice. We agree with their position, but we don’t simply come with another voice of complaint: we bring a viable, ready-made technical solution that can be used today to implement true opt-in data mining permissions and reservations.

The full document in PDF form can be viewed here:

• IPTC and PLUS response to UK government consultation on AI and copyright.pdf