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One of the UK’s most prominent artist rights leaders has claimed that the country's government ministers still won’t meet Britain’s creators to discuss the use of copyrighted content in AI training, despite repeated lobbying.
Deborah Annetts, CEO of the Independent Society of Musicians and Chair of the Creators’ Rights Alliance, claimed that artists have been shut out of the AI and copyright debate by policymakers, who have yet to even start a conversation with them. Speaking at a Westminster Media Forum policy conference on Next Steps for Music Policy on 14 April, she said:
The creative industries – in terms of the creators and the people who represent the people who are actually doing the creating – have still not had a meeting with the Ministers in DSIT [the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology]. And that is despite repeated letters, questions, and lobbying. We just cannot get in to see Ministers.
It's an extraordinary revelation in the context of such a fierce and public debate. More, Annetts claimed that British politicians have, for years, believed that US AI vendors would solve the UK’s economic growth problem, if government simply handed Britain’s IP to them on a plate.
That was the real reason for Downing Street’s actions in recent years, she claimed – decisions that caused UK creatives to express their outrage at recently abandoned proposals to opt them in to AI training by default.
How we got here...
More from Annetts and the conference in a moment. But first let’s remind ourselves of Britain’s woeful journey to this point, as it is both useful and instructive.
Together, AI and copyright are the gift that keeps on taking for artists, musicians, authors, academics, photographers, and filmmakers – not to mention for publishers and media organisations of every size. AI vendors keep scraping data from proprietary sources without consent, credit, or payment to creators and rightsholders, while spinning their ‘transformed’ offerings as machine super-intelligence that is available to all with zero effort and skill.
But it is also the gift that keeps on taking for Britain’s post-Brexit government. As reported by diginomica over the past three years, Whitehall’s policy vacuum on AI training and copyright has made a great many people angry. That vacuum is perceived as having solely benefited a handful of US technology corporations, while ignoring a creative sector that contributes over $160 billion to the UK economy – over ten times the value of the domestic AI market.
So, how did we get here? To re-cap, the previous administration of former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was accused of sitting on its hands and failing to enforce copyright law by the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee, in the wake of its Large Language Model Inquiry two years ago.
According to the Committee, that inaction was little more than tacit support for US hyperscalers, against the wishes of Britain’s creators – a belief that appears vindicated by Annetts’ comments this week.
Then in 2025, Sir Keir Starmer’s government went further – if that is the right word – by expressing a preferred policy option of opting creators’ work into AI training by default, with an (unworkable) opt-out offered as a sop to artists, authors, and academics, along with an (unenforceable) demand for vendor transparency.
Cue protests by creators, rightsholders, and media companies, and a public consultation last year that overwhelmingly rejected the idea. At which point the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) compounded the damage by suggesting that the opposition should be taken with a pinch of salt as it mainly came from “the creative communities”.
Coming from an organization whose core purpose is protecting Britain’s intellectual property, that was an outrageous position, yet it was expressed by senior managers at a Westminster Forum on AI and copyright earlier this year. In a sane world, their resignations would have followed, but we abandoned that world long ago.
But the IPO’s claim was also untrue. Britain’s AI trade organization, UKAI, also strongly opposed the Government’s plan, describing it as “damaging”, “misguided”, and “divisive” in its own strongly worded report, published soon after the Lords’ LLM Inquiry.
To date, the British Government has never commented on or even acknowledged the UKAI report, despite diginomica writing to DSIT three times last year to ask why they had ignored it.
But the department’s ‘no comment’ stance was hardly surprising: acknowledging the report or engaging with its detail would have exposed the government’s claim to be helping the domestic AI sector as, at best, mis-informed, and at worst, as an outright lie.
However, a chink of light appeared for Britain’s creative sectors last month when Downing Street finally walked back its preferred option, apparently taking it off the table in a moment of damage-limiting introspection.
That said, quite what damage was being limited remains a mystery; it had surely already been done in terms of public outrage and creatives’ spiralling livelihoods and lost trust.
Anything changed?
So, what policy has taken its place? Nothing of substance, alas, beyond a stated commitment by Downing Street to listen and learn, at least for another month. The government must respond to the Communications and Digital Committee’s latest Inquiry, which was specifically on AI and Copyright (see diginomica, passim), by 16 May.
Like the LLM Inquiry before it, the Committee’s blunt but detailed report from those sessions urged the government to enforce copyright law and protect Britain’s creatives, and not just cave in to US vendors’ wishes, a position it reached after hearing expert evidence from all sides of the debate between November 2025 and January this year.
But until the UK Government publishes its formal response to the Committee’s recommendations next month, the three and a half years of policy vacuum that have existed since the launch of ChatGPT continue.
But the good news is that the Government is at least listening to Britain’s creative communities and considering options that benefit everyone, right? After all, it said so in its own report last month on AI and copyright, which essentially took 125 pages to say little else.
The answer is: no. At least, according to Annetts:
Things have got a little bit better because of what the Government said on 18 March in response to the consultation. But the creative industries – in terms of the creators and the people who represent the people who are actually doing the creating – have still not had a meeting with DSIT ministers! And that is despite repeated letters, questions, and lobbying. We just cannot get in to see ministers. And while it's fantastic to be able to talk to DCMS [the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport] civil servants, the lead organization in this is DSIT, and we are still being kept out!
That is extraordinary given that the creative industries are worth £125 billion [$169 billion at current exchange rates], while AI in this country is only worth about £11.8 billion [$16 billion]. We simply do not understand it. It makes no sense commercially. So, the thing I would say is, ‘Can we please start having that conversation?’
Indeed. Annetts’ revelation is truly staggering, given how long these arguments have been raging and how public they have been.
And it begs the question, just who has the Government been talking to, given that two House of Lords Inquiries have taken place over the past three years, and there have been numerous reports and campaigns in the meantime? Yet, Downing Street has apparently failed to give UK creatives the time of day; it beggars belief.
So, while acknowledging that last month saw an (apparent) change of heart from Downing Street, albeit in the context of a policy vacuum, why does Annetts believe that the Government has ignored even UKAI’s criticisms? And why does No 10 only appear to have heeded the words of new strategic partner OpenAI, and of Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, and other advocates for the US AI sector, such as the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change? She told diginomica:
It is a question we ask ourselves all the time! We really don't understand it.
But right at the very start – if we go back to about October 2024 – we were hearing that the Government had been having a lot of conversations with US tech companies, which had basically told them that they could solve the UK’s growth problem if they could just get access to all the content from our creative industries. So, it was seen initially as a quick fix for sorting out our growth problems. And then we had the consultation, which had that ghastly preferred option in it, which went down incredibly badly and managed to generate 11,500 responses, most of which were against what the government was suggesting.
By that time, trust between the creative industries and the UK government had fallen to pretty much an all-time low.
Quite so. At this point, however, an unexpected voice chipped in to the conversation: Scott Farrant, Chair of the Music Industry Technical Solutions Group at the Intellectual Property Office – the very organisation which, at a previous Westminster Forum, pooh-poohed creatives’ opposition in the most patronising of terms.
Farrant was at pains to point out that, despite his billing at the event, he is not employed by the IPO directly, but is merely a consultant working with them. (Duly noted.) He said:
I one hundred percent agree with what Deborah is saying. [The Government’s policy] was previously ill-considered. It was throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And it ignored the immense value of the UK’s creative industries to try to attract AI investment.
My take
A round of applause for Farrant and, especially, for Annetts, whose revelation that DSIT has yet to give UK creators the time of day – despite repeated lobbying and letters – is, frankly, jaw-dropping.
But at least someone finally said it: that this administration and the previous Conservative government were so staggeringly naïve that they believed US vendors’ promise to, by some unspecified means, magically deliver UK growth – but only if government handed all our IP to them on a plate, for nothing.
That this was what ministers believed – and perhaps still believe – has been obvious ever since Rishi Sunak first engaged with those vendors at the Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit.
And it was there, hiding in plain sight, in former digital minister Feryal Clark’s speech at a Westminster AI conference last Spring, in which she claimed that AI would deliver “infinite productivity” and equality for all. That's a sentiment so idiotic that it was hard to believe an adult believed them, let alone said them aloud at a conference.
So, what next? Well, who can say? We should never underestimate government’s ability to shoot itself in the foot and come up with yet another hairbrained scheme.
But for the next month at least, all we have to go on is the Government’s recent report on AI and copyright, which is the policy equivalent of the words 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy' repeated hundreds of times.
For whatever reasons, Britain’s policymakers believe that simply enforcing existing copyright laws would be a step too far – despite two House of Lords reports, based on weeks of expert testimony and detailed consultation, urging them to do just that.
It really is indescribably sad and an utter failure of common sense and good governance. Just enforce existing laws, Prime Minister. After all, it is why they exist.