Government amends copyright law to make the UK an AI leader in a post-Brexit world

The government is set to amend copyright law to make it easier to analyse material for the purposes of machine learning, research and innovation, paving the way for the UK to become an artificial intelligence leader.

Under the new rules, anyone with lawful access to this material should be able to carry out this analysis without further permission from the copyright owner. 

This data mining provision, which is where software is used to analyse material for patterns, trends and other useful information, will take advantage of the UK’s ability to set its own copyright laws now that we have left the EU.

Among other uses, data mining can be used when training AI systems. For example, machine-learning software which has been trained on large repositories of computer code is able to intelligently suggest new code to programmers.

The proposed changes come after a government consultation, and look to bring benefit to a wide range of stakeholders including researchers, AI developers and cultural heritage institutions. This supports the government’s ambition for the UK to be a global leader in AI innovation and research.

The government has decided that no changes will be made to the UK’s patent inventorship criteria or copyright computer generated works provisions at this time.

It will keep AI technical development under review to help ensure that UK inventorship rules continue to support AI innovation and will seek to advance discussions internationally to support the UK’s economic interests.

Science & Innovation Minister George Freeman said:“Now that the UK has the ability to set our own copyright laws for the first time in decades, we want to ensure the UK continues to have one of the best intellectual property frameworks in the world. IP is key to innovation.

He said that new UK rules on copyright and data mining will act as a “catalyst for our innovators to flourish”, helping ensure the UK’s IP system remains a powerful enabler for ground-breaking research and development.

Minister for Tech and the Digital Economy Chris Philp added: “The UK is at the forefront of research and innovation when it comes to AI and these updates to copyright law will ensure we remain a science and tech superpower, enabling our world-class researchers and AI developers to unleash AI’s full potential and create new benefits across the country”.