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No one will make music in Britain any more if Labour’s AI copyright proposal succeeds, Sir Brian May warned last night as he backed the Daily Mail’s campaign against it.
The Queen guitarist said he feared it may already be ‘too late’ because ‘monstrously arrogant’ Big Tech barons have already carried out an industrial-scale ‘theft’ of Britain’s cultural genius.
He called on the Government to apply the brakes before the next chapter of Britain’s rich cultural heritage – which includes Shakespeare, Chaucer, James Bond, The Beatles and Britpop – is nipped in the bud thanks to Sir Keir Starmer‘s copyright ‘sell-out’.
Sir Brian, whose rock band sold more than 300 million records, is just the latest star to join the fight against handing billionaire offshore artificial-intelligence companies the keys to pillage the nation’s £126 billion cultural industry.
Sir Elton John, Simon Cowell, and Richard Osman are among those warning that the plans risk devastating an industry which employs 2.4 million people.
Sir Brian answered a call to arms from acclaimed English singer-songwriter Mike Batt, a former deputy chairman of the British Phonographic Industry and a leading voice in the fight against the AI proposal.
Sir Brian said: ‘My fear is that it’s already too late – this theft has already been performed and is unstoppable, like so many incursions that the monstrously arrogant billionaire owners of Al and social media are making into our lives. The future is already forever changed.
‘But I applaud this campaign to make the public aware of what is being lost. I hope it succeeds in putting a brake on, because if not, nobody will be able to afford to make music from here on in.’
Labour has backed proposals to allow Big Tech firms to ignore copyright rules when training their artificial-intelligence systems using existing material – including Queen’s songs or Richard Osman’s crime novels, for example.
Ministers plan to change the law so that tech giants can use any online material – such as text, images or music – to improve their AI models without respecting the copyright laws that ensure its creators get paid. Instead, creators would have to ‘opt out’ of having their work exploited in this way.
Some of the most senior executives in Britain’s music, media and film industries, as well as stars, authors, leading politicians and campaigners, have urged the Government to think again.
They warned its plans would be ‘catastrophic’, with valuable creative work and intellectual property effectively ‘stolen’ and wealth transferred back to Silicon Valley tech barons.
The plans could also threaten Britain’s free Press, with journalistic content taken from newspaper websites without recompense. At the weekend, X Factor creator Simon Cowell warned that artists’ livelihoods ‘risk being wiped out’.
He added: ‘The thought that anyone would believe they have the right to blindly give this country’s creative ideas away – for nothing – is just wrong.’
Sir Elton said the plan ‘would devastate our creative community’, ‘help powerful foreign technology companies make profits’, ‘destroy the UK’s leadership’ as a cultural superpower and ‘give it all away – for nothing’.
A public consultation on the proposals is set to conclude tomorrow. The Government insists that creative industries will be consulted.
