Good news: the Govt. has decided to pause its potential relaxation of copyright laws to facilitate the theft & scraping of 'protected' content by AI/LLM 'research'.
Less good: after a consultation which largely demonstrated significant support for leaving copyright as is, Labour is still thinking how it can accommodate Big Tech's demand to be allowed to steal information with impunity.
So copyright remains in play, leaving uncertainty for anyone depending on its rules.
#copyright #AI
h/t FT
Preventing US companies accessing UK data would be a significant act of rebellion in today's world, and the equivalent of denying oxygen to an predatory animal.
Unfortunately, the UK govt has already been rolled into dependency on US cloud platforms and pressured into contracts with dystopian tech companies like Oracle and Palantir, so anything the govt does now is damage limitation.
....not suggesting for one moment that the UK govt shouldn't move to protect UK IP and copyright and end it's dependency on US tech, I just think it's ten years too late.
This exactly. The tech industry has been given decades of freedom because regulation has never managed to catch up with development. UK companies and the govt pandered to tech monopolies that had already proven their unsuitability by their repeated refusal to ditch proprietary standards.
Consolidating all of those systems on US cloud infrastructure was a spectacularly stupid thing to do, and as you say, this is not hindsight because people did warn against it.
....it's slightly surprising that so many people simply accepted everything that tech came up with with barely a question, and now we're stuck with foreign owned data, proprietary smartphones, and even biometrics in state schools.
The real irony is that the govt banned Chinese smartphones on security grounds, and now they're only available to UK users when Google is baked in.
Emeritus Prof Christopher May
Reg
KevinOnEarth