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Patent Matters
Episode 6 - The Case for Copyright in the Age of AI
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In this episode of Patent Matters, host Dave Hunt sits down with William Bose, a UK-based attorney and global expert in copyright, trademarks, and intellectual property policy.
With experience spanning YouGov, Condé Nast, and Cambridge University Press, William brings a unique perspective on how copyright shapes innovation, creativity, and access to knowledge—especially in the age of AI.
🔍 What we cover:
- Why copyright is a “liberty,” not just a restriction
- The historical role of copyright in democratizing knowledge
- The growing tension between AI development and content ownership
- How fair use vs. global copyright frameworks create confusion
- Why the internet lacks a functioning digital marketplace for content
- Whether AI companies should pay for training data
- Real-world copyright challenges—from scientific publishing to Olympic performances
- The risks of weakening copyright and what it means for future innovation
We also dive into William’s Substack, “Books Don’t Grow on Trees,” and his work shaping UK AI policy—exploring how governments can balance technology, sovereignty, and sustainability.
💡 Key takeaway:
As AI transforms how content is created and consumed, the systems that support creators—and the quality of future knowledge—are at a critical crossroads.
If you care about innovation, patents, publishing, or the future of AI, this episode is a must-listen.
👉 Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share Patent Matters for more conversations at the intersection of IP, technology, and policy.
Patents aren't just legal documents. They represent million-dollar decisions. The Patent Matters podcast takes you behind the curtain and shares best practices. Hosted by the experts at Ensemble IP, we're having real conversations with innovators, patent attorneys, agents, and IP leaders who know the stakes and know how to win.
SPEAKER_01Welcome back to Patent Matters. I'm Dave Hunt, your host, and it's a pleasure today to be with William Bose, who is an attorney in the UK, quite a gentleman. He's an expert in trademarks and copyrights. Not only does he advise corporations and organizations, but he is very active in advising governments and policymakers around the world. Will, it's a pleasure to have you here. Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to you. It's really great to be here. Yeah, it's great. And, you know, I'd just looking at your career, you've been a general counsel at quite a few organizations. Most recently and currently at Ugov. Prior to that, you're at Condymast. I think prior to that, Cambridge University Press, you've had a working life both in the UK and the United States. Is that right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we mostly in the UK and the US, but the companies I've worked for have all been global. And I've also done work. A lot of them have had lots of work out in Asia. So they've done lots of work in China, India, other parts of Asia, and then also lots of work in Brussels. And when obviously when the UK was part of the European Union, a lot of our copyright work was focused over there. And I was a director of the Federation of European Publishers for a while over there too. So yeah, Europe as well.
SPEAKER_01Tell us a little bit about what your work at Ugov is like, what you do, and how that also impacts your policy positions and your approach to the issue of copyrights and the importance of it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So for those of you who don't know, UGov is an online polling company. We were founded 25 years ago by our current CEO, Stefan Shakespeare. And it really was a really innovative way of doing polling for the first time. So no longer clipboards and phones. We've got a panel now of 28 million people who answer surveys and questions and give real-time insights into what they think. Very much focused on the political space and public opinion initially, but has grown over time to be very focused in terms of commercial marketing research as well. I've been general counsel there for a little over a year now. And as part of that, I lead the legal function. I look after legal compliance, IP. And obviously, we're, as everyone is at the moment, going through this transformative time of AI. So I'm doing a lot of work with the business advising them on new AI products and services, thinking very much about how we use AI to improve what we do. But also, we're really about routing our research in reality. So very much about what real people think. We don't want to get into a world of instead, we see our value as we've got the original data, the source data of what people really, really think. And therefore our AI helps us amplify that data, but it doesn't replace it in any way. So very much drawing a thin line, a careful line between data ethics, data integrity, respecting the privacy of our panel members, but also trying to use this technology to make that data richer and more informed.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, very good. For our audience, which typically consists of folks that are patent experts or through people that care about intellectual property as it relates to inventions, we don't often talk about copyrights. We live in this world, though. In my case, having been an owner of a patent search company and then a provider of patent search software, it's critical that we cite scientific articles and publications in an effort to determine whether or not it's relevant to getting a patent or the validity of a patent. So we believe that copyrights are critically important. And a lot of folks in our field don't have a deep understanding of it. So we'll get into a little bit of that today as well. But before we do, I wanted to also chat with you about Substack, the social media platform where you actually have contributions. Your site is called Books Don't Grow on Trees. Yeah, Books Don't Grow on Trees. Yeah. And so tell us a little bit about that and what led you to create that and how is that going?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So I started writing around this because I'm really passionate about books and the existence of books and the value that books bring to society. And I've become really worried about the way copyright law's been going in the last 25 years, in particular the US Fair Use Doctrine, which you can come back to, about the way that's changing the norms of copyright around the world, well beyond the United States. And I started, I'm worried that policymakers are complacent about copyright. They're complacent about how books are created. Now, I'm not denying that if copyright had never existed, people wouldn't have been writing books. People were writing books before copyright, and they will continue to do so. But copyright's contribution to enabling the world to organize and structure its information and make that available and create a sustainable ecosystem for the continuous production of high-quality learning materials that everyone can find and access and continue to benefit from has been deeply profound. My understanding of all this really came from when I was back at Cambridge University Press. So CUP was founded in 1534 by Henry VIII. That's a good 170 years before the English Parliament passed the first Copyright Act in 1709. And when I first got to CUP, I had to do a lot of work around its corporate constitution to figure out its ownership and its relationship to the university and think a lot about the press as an organization, how we could modernize it and make it a better organization. And in doing all of that, you know, really looking at those ancient constitutional documents and how it was founded, it became, it hit me in a way that I hadn't really appreciated before. That before copyright, the king got to decide who published and what was published. And that was the way you know the UK had been for centuries. And as I started looking into that and then reading through the university library, that there's this amazing archive of publishing going back all the way back five or six hundred years with documents going through all this period of time. And you read those and you see the evolution of publishing and how the norms and the models evolved, and you can really see the profound impact that copyright had, creating liberty for English people to finally own their own thoughts, ideas, and creations. You know, we've had feudalism in this country for hundreds of years, and that intellectual feudalism only ended in 1709 when for the first time that we were allowed to own what we thought, publish, and communicate that with other people. In the United States, you've always had that since the beginning of the United States, copyright from the very beginning, and then of course your First Amendment. But that was not how this country was born. Everything was controlled for a very long period of time, whether by the Crown or the Church. And copyright created that liberty by creating a marketplace for ideas where people could own their own thoughts and inventions, sell them, make them available to other people. And that created this amazing rising tide of knowledge. It democratized knowledge. Knowledge wasn't a privilege. You didn't have to work at Cambridge University or go to Cambridge University to have access to books or to publish a book. Anyone in the country could read and access things. It had great concepts like legal deposits. So a copy of every book published got placed in these libraries, placed all around the country. But the key point was we as the state will give you the liberty to own your own thoughts and ideas for the first time. But you will be accountable for what you publish. And your name will be on that. And if you do something which you shouldn't, then we will know what you've done. And that was a fair deal. And it really helped power the Enlightenment. If you look at the publication of books, the number of books published throughout the 18th century grew exponentially. My concern, you know, practicing law throughout this digital era, has been that we've become complacent about copyright. We've begun to believe that maybe books grow on trees and that perhaps we don't need to work so hard at the policy architecture behind that. This amazing right that has organized and protected and preserved and grown and democratized knowledge for 300 years. Maybe we don't need that anymore. We get very complacent around all of that. And we're all so excited about technology and invention and getting things for free that we this whole copyright to restriction. But I fundamentally believe it's not. It's a liberty. It's a liberty of mind as a British citizen, and it's one that I hold very dear. And in recent years, we've had things like a Human Rights Act, which have started to preserve free speech in other ways, but it's the grounding of intellectual thought and endeavor, a democratization of that. And I kind of want to help our politicians understand that and make sure they keep thinking about it and make the right decisions.
SPEAKER_01I think just general folks who read and use information, we do it all the time. Many of us have mobile phones. We access the internet. Now we're accessing large language models, a chat GPT, and so forth. It seems like it's getting more complex, more confusing. I doubt anybody on the street really knows what fair use is. If they think they're doing something harmless, like singing happy birthday to somebody at a restaurant, they wonder whether or not they have to pay, you know, Warner, I guess it's Warner Music, uh, a fee for singing a song. Like, how do we how do we clear that up, not just for policymakers, but for the general public?
SPEAKER_02I spend time in the US. So I'll talk a lot about UK though, but I have spent time living in the US and I do understand why the US position is different, but try and make a contrast. Section 1-1 of the UK Copyright Design and Patents Act, 1988, makes it all very clear. Copyright is a property right. That's the first thing it says. You've then got 300 other sections that make it all very complicated and deal with all the complexity. But copyright at its basic principle is very simple. It is a property right. I own it. And if you want to use that, you need my permission. So you start from that premise, which I don't think fair use does anymore because of the transformative use doctrine. That is a key difference, I think, between we're divided by a common language in so many ways, design having spent time over there. But as a property right, you need permission, you can send. Now, we have certain exceptions. In the UK, they're incredibly limited. They're around teaching, learning, research, parody. They're very, very narrow and they're very for specific public benefit purposes. That's very different from the fair use doctrine, where actually you can say, okay, well, if I'm more inventive with the use of this work than you, then potentially you don't have a copyright at all anymore. I've got a defense to infringe with. I appreciate that there's a technicality there. So the UK law is very, very, very stringent. So what you're describing to me, I see as a market problem, not a legal problem. It's about saying, how do I, how do I let's let's be reasonable about this and just singing happy birthday, is that an infringement? But let's also make sure that there are market mechanisms that can enable that. So that's why you have collective licensing. So you created a system in the 20th century whereby people will take micro licenses for micropayments, and you could buy blanket licenses so that people can play radios in cafes and people can play like canned music in various different places. You have a whole series of market mechanisms that surround the core. And for me, it's those that haven't been updated for the digital and the AI age. I don't think big tech have wanted to engage with them, and I think they've used the fair use doctrine and to some extent, section 230 as an excuse not to engage in those market mechanisms. But what's missing for me is that there's no digital marketplace for content. Like if you compare this, for example, with digital advertising, there's an incredibly complicated system for real-time bidding for digital advertising exchange to take place all the time online. The technology is complicated. You have a process in a system whereby people bid against each other and you find the right price for that ad. And it all happens in an automatic way behind the scenes, right? There's a really sophisticated digital ad marketplace that powers the internet. Why is there not a sophisticated digital content marketplace that powers the internet? The truth is that there's been no incentive for the technology companies to build that marketplace because it would cost them money. And they've been able to rely on the fair use doctrine as a plausible defense not to bother to do so. So that's why no one knows who owns what on the internet anymore. There's this sort of penumber of uncertainty around what's in the public domain and what's not. It's the fair use doctrine, the transformative thinking around that has created that space. And US tech companies, as they've gone around the world, have tried as much as possible, it's understandably commercially and rationally, I don't criticize them at all in this sense, to just try and adopt the model that they have at home and make that work overseas.
SPEAKER_01Good point. How does that digital marketplace for content actually get created then? Is it through legislation or is it through international organizations like the United Nations or treaties and so forth? How does that actually come about in a way that you don't have a Swiss cheese approach and it's effective and it's clear? Where does it begin and how does it get to that point?
SPEAKER_02So a couple of thoughts. Firstly, one of the regulatory challenges around AI is that here we are with a technology that's never been more global and never been more universal, but it's coming along at a time where geopolitics has never been more fragmented and there's never been a lower period of trust or use of multilateral institutions. You know, you can look at the Byrne Convention, the International Copyright Treaty, and the EU and other international bodies, that I'm afraid that they're just not working at just the time when that might all be really, really useful. So is a global sort of treaty approach or something. I think that's frankly politically, geopolitically unlikely, even if the IP community could and the tech and everyone could come together and find a way through it. But what I think is interesting is it's a combination of both the law and the market. So, firstly, unless or until the law is clear that you have to pay, then I can understand why commercially and rationally tech companies won't pay. They'll just rather pay lawyers to argue that they don't have to pay than pay creators for the books that they've been using to build their AI systems. But so then how do you create that marketplace? Well, partly, as I said, there's systems of collective licensing that were designed to create this kind of blanket license for these smaller uses that were not the primary sale. There's regulation in the UK that manages, so I think you could look at the regulation around collective licensing, you could try and transform, you could create a 21st-century digital version of collective licensing. Hey guys, you know, photocopiers aren't the issue anymore. Like AI systems are. Let's have a look at what you do and let's try and make you part of the mainstream content marketplace. Secondly, you are seeing some of the tech companies thinking about creating content marketplaces. So both Microsoft and Amazon have been talking in recent weeks and months about creating a digital content marketplace. I think creative industries might want to think very carefully about whether they want to allow large dominant players to entrench their power further by managing those marketplaces. But certainly there's initiative, invention, and commercial need from some tech companies now to try and create a digital content marketplace. So that's interesting. I think from a regulatory perspective, there should be some parameters around that. We need to make sure that market was fair and was working in the right way. But there does seem to be some interest in technology companies in making that work. But the third thing I'd say the UK put forward a really interesting idea last year called the Creative Content Exchange, where they were putting forward a concept and saying, what can we do as a government to try and prompt that innovation? And firstly, and you've got to be really clear with the law that there is a need to take a license unless you fall within one of our now list of exceptions. But there is interesting thinking around what can government do to try and bring people together, create the conditions for conversations, which would be difficult for companies to have conversations around pricing for antitrust reasons. But can the government enable conversations around how that marketplace could be created, potentially fund some of the infrastructure? We'll have to see where that proposal from the UK government goes. But it's an interesting one. And I think it goes to the core of the problem, which is this is a market problem. It's not a fundamental problem with copyright law per se, which I think the principles are as strong and true today as they always have been.
SPEAKER_01I wonder whether or not technology companies, when they move from just building technology to actually being creators of content. If you look at some like whether it's Amazon Prime, Apple, others, as part of their business model in order to generate revenues, does that cause them to be more supportive for these collective? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02You'd think so. I mean, you know, that once you start relying on the copyright yourself, you kind of see the benefit of that. And I remember this back in my Cambridge University press days, where lots of the academics we were working with were trying to get free access to uh materials so that they could do inventions to create patents that could make them millions of pounds. I mean, this is all rational commercial behavior, right? So I'm not trying to criticize people for it, but in whatever walk of life, if you can minimize the cost of your inputs and maximize the revenue from what you create, of course you're going to try and do that. My issue is that the policymakers have been allowing copyright to be squashed down too much for too long, and that's now creating a risk that there won't be good inputs, and that will eventually diminish the quality of the outputs, and that will be bad for humanity over a period of time. And bear in mind, pretty much everything that's been trained on the internet today, that's been used to train AI and been available on the internet today, is all content that's been created from a copyright era. We don't even know what this is all going to look like when we've got decades of digital experience where there has not been a strong copyright. So far, we've had the best of both worlds, is what I'm trying to say. We've been able to benefit from all these really strong, high-quality works funded by copyright and take the benefit of that and give everyone that away for free. But we don't know what it's going to look like when there isn't that pipeline continuing of strong, well-funded, high-quality, accurate copyright works.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I imagine it's going to get more difficult as AI allegedly creates content, and we don't know whether or not it was a human or whether or not it was an algorithm. And like, then is there even a copyright there if it was not created by a human? And if you can't identify who created it, what happens then?
SPEAKER_02Well, there's two really important questions. So a lot of what I've been talking about obviously has been about inputs and training data. And my belief that if you're going to have that transfer of wealth, then you should pay the people who've created the original stuff you've used. You know, why should an ALA company have to pay for their electricity, have to pay for their rent, for their offices, have to pay for their staff, have to pay for the tea in their office kitchen, but not have to pay for the raw materials. They have to pay for the compute, they have to pay for the people, but they think they should get the training data for free because that's in the public interest or a public good. Well, why don't they get everything else for free? It doesn't really make any sense. So there's the there's the equity, the justice, and the importance of paying for your inputs. But your point on the outputs, if we are going to live in a world with robotic creativity in the future, at the very least we need to compensate the humans who've created that robotic world. Whether we want to live in that future world is another really important question about how IP law develops. But I I'm very focused on maintaining the supply of high-quality content coming into these systems first and foremost, so that at least whatever we do with the outputs, we could as good as possible, we know they're still being informed and supported by high-quality inputs.
SPEAKER_01What are your thoughts about some of these large AI companies that purchase books and materials, maybe strip the binding off of them and then use them to train algorithms? How should the creator be compensated for that? Should they be allowed to do that?
SPEAKER_02So there's something in the US called the first sale doctrine. In the UK, it's called exhaustion, whereby once you sell a copy of a physical book. So here you go, Law of Artificial Intelligence. Great book. Highly recommend it. In this book, so I bought this book, and the author has had his copyright in this copy has been exhausted because there's been like a first sale. So I could now sell this in a secondhand bookstore, lawfully, completely lawfully, whether in the UK or the US. But what I could not do would be to strip all the binding off, scan it, and then make an e-book and start selling this book cost me 240 pounds, $300. What I would not be allowed to do is scan it and then start selling it for $75 as an ebook, just because I bought this physical copy. The reason I can't is because in every book you have a title page, and in that title page is a copyright license. All rights reserved, no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means or stored in any retrieval system of any nature, et cetera, et cetera, or subject to the UK Copyrights Designs and Patents Act. Or if you would like to get a license from the copyright licensing agency, you can do. So we know when we download an e-book, we sign terms and conditions, and we know there's an IP license. What none of us consciously realize is every single book we've ever bought has got a copyright license on the title page and it tells us we can't do that. And that applies just as much to Meta or Anthropic or anyone who's taken this book and scanned it as it would for me deciding to do this, you know, it's just a little side hustle. So that that's the law. Those are the rules. The license is there, it's clear what you can and can't do. This has been thought about in the law. There's a case in the EU called Tom Cabinet case, which says you can't have second-hand digital e-books. You know, these things are, they aren't sort of new. You know, copyright law is thought about them in other contexts, in other technologies, in other times. And it's a case of reminding policymakers what the law is, reasserting it. And let's just focus on building a great content market again, but a 21st century version of that, where I am free to own what I write and I can sell it to you for a fair price, and then other people can benefit from that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, very good. In the patent world, we are often citing what we call it non-patent literature. So it's not a patent document, it's not a published patent application or an issued patent, but it's a science, usually it's a scientific article or a publication. And sometimes they're very hard to come by. You may have a reference to it, maybe you see a reference to it online, but getting the actual document and reading it is difficult in some cases, not all, but in some cases. And it has been the practice in the patent field that if you can get it by another means, it's okay. For example, when you file a patent application and a patent examiner, regardless of the country that they're in, if they cite a scientific article or publication and put it in the record, it's called a file wrapper or a patent file wrapper. If they put it in the record and there's a copy of it there, then you don't have to pay the copyright fee, allegedly. You can take it and you can share it with others in the office and then cite it. Is that improper? Because it is a practice that has been going on for many, many years. If they can't get it from a paid source, but it shows up in the government record, it's able to be used and then cited. And they want to cite it because they don't want to infringe on somebody else's intellectual property from a patent perspective. But is that improper?
SPEAKER_02No, it's not improper. So copyright has various ways of enabling access to content in certain specific circumstances. For example, in the UK context, obviously the one I know. Best under section 50, acts done under statutory authority provides a specific mechanism which the patent office can use to make academic literature available to people in the course of handling patent prosecutions. So the UK IPO gets access to the content, and then if it needs to cite it or reference it, it has that exception available to it upon which it can be made available. But I think the other thing to cover is that the whole world of academic literature has changed an awful lot in the last 10 years or so. So you now have this concept of open access publishing. So an awful lot of academic journals content and book content is made available on an open access basis. So it's not all behind paywalls now. There have also been lots of deals that publishers have done for sort of various contents, sometimes on an embargoed basis, so it's delayed slightly. But there are lots of different mechanisms now, and then of course, collective licensing that mean you have options other than just to go behind a paywall. But in addition, copyright does have this specific mechanism that in the UK at least enables you to get access to the relevant academic literature you need in a patent filing context.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01Understood. Tell us a little bit about your efforts with IAM. So your vision for AI policy in the UK. How is that going? What are the pillars of it? And is this something that can be extended to other countries?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So a friend of mine and I have been talking a lot about how we, where the UK is going on AI policy. And, you know, I guess particularly because I've been in the US for several years. And I was in the US around the time that a lot of this stuff kicks off with OpenAI and the other providers. And so we have been concerned coming back. The UK has basically so far taken an approach of very light touch AI regulation. It's basically saying AI is going to be everywhere. We'll allow it to find its own way. And we're not going to have general overarching AI regulation at all. And we'll just see what happens. That is quite troubling for something that is pervasive as AI, and we're concerned about what that means. At the same time, we're also concerned that the government is buying a huge amount of AI services from overseas tech companies, mostly US tech companies. And Trump came over in September and there was a technology deal announced, which involved lots of investment by US tech companies, but also lots of procurement by the UK taxpayer to buy AI services for use in UK public services. The UK is not in a great place economically. It hasn't been for 10 or 15 years now, fairly flatlined since the financial crash in terms of growth. And so there's been a lot of budgetary pressure to try and reduce the cost of public services whilst also trying to keep taxes to a minimum. And so there's lots of incentive to trying to find ways of efficiencies and cost savings in public services, which, as you all know, that public services play a much larger part in the UK than they do in the US. And so this is a real priority. And we're concerned that they were being driven far too much by these short-term economic budgetary gains and not thinking long-term about what does the UK need. AIM is not about being anti-AI or pro-AI, it's accepting the fact that AI is here and it's going to impact everything. And because of that, we need to have a vision for what the UK might look like in an AI world. And so Ben and I kind of were saying, well, what would if there was a UK, a new UK political party started tomorrow that that only was campaigning on AI, what would its manifesto be? Like what would the manifesto for the UK look like if we were just to just look at the UK purely through an AI lens that took into account our needs, our laws, our culture, our traditions, like our sensitivities and our geography and the things that were important to us as opposed to the norms, laws, cultures, et cetera, that shape the AI companies that are providing the services to us. We also are concerned that the huge amount of UK lobbying around AI is being well dominated by US companies. So if you look at our former Prime Minister Sunak, who's off advising Microsoft and other people, George Osborne, our former finance minister, chancellor, is now working for OpenAI. Nick Clegg had a leadership role at Facebook and Meta for many years. A lot of our senior politicians who have all the access and the networks within London to influence government policy are earning a fair chunk of money from US companies to try and use that power and influence to make sure the UK makes decisions that favor those dominant players. And we're concerned around that. So we just want to start a conversation. We also know that a lot of the industry lobbying groups are also very well funded by overseas companies. Even in the publishing industry, most of the UK publishers now are owned by German parents like Bertelsmann or US parents like News Corp. You know, there are very few independent UK publishers left. And so when people come, and I've sat in these roundtable meetings in Westminster and Whitehall and Brussels for a number of years. And when you come into those conversations, people arrive at those meetings knowing their own parameters, what they are and aren't allowed to say. And I think a lot of the people will be coming trying to talk about fair use and trying to have the fair use doctrine brought into the UK. That came about with the Cameron government 10 or 15 years ago and is now being talked about again. And so we wanted to just try and say no one's coming from a truly independent system. What would it look like? If you're truly neutral, you had no funding, you had no lobby, you had no agenda, what would AI policy look like? And so we came up with this sort of manifesto based on three pillars. One is around leadership, where we think, you know, we've been leading in so many important sectors, whether science, pharma, innovation, publishing, media, creative industries. We've got real strengths in academia, business, and technology of our own kind, and we should be really playing a leading role rather than just being adopter of other people's technology. The second is around AI sovereignty. It's really important that as a sovereign nation, we have control over our own data and control over our own destiny. And so, you know, we shouldn't be making our data, our information as available and as vulnerable to overseas companies and overseas countries. We've had 70 or 80 years of working very closely with the US in all sorts of political, military, cultural, and other kinds of contexts. But unfortunately, we're in a time where we can't necessarily take that for granted. So just assuming that we'll always be allied with the US and that it's okay to share all this stuff with them all of the time and their companies and that our data is as safe there as it is here. We can't really assume those kinds of things anymore. So we really want to be independent. And we also obviously have a very strong common law system here. People come from all over the world to litigate K2C. We've got our own legal system. We shouldn't be copying and pasting laws, whether those be the US fair use system or the EU AI Act. We we created copyright. We've got the ability to innovate with our own legal system where we should be thinking about laws and traditions that suit our norms, our culture, and our country rather than just copying and pasting other people's. And then our third pillar is around sustainability, making sure that the UK is sustainable both in terms of a climate perspective, which we're an island, you know, we have real issues around coastal erosion, flood defenses. It's rained here for 41 days in a row now. I'm hoping to see some sun sometime. But we have to be thinking about our own geography and then our own challenges of that nature, but also economically sustainable. So climate sustainability, economic sustainability, that's a copyright. So the key is economically giving back and making sure that our economy, we're not transferring vast amounts of wealth to overseas companies, overseas shareholders, buying our companies, like we're reinvesting in our own country, our own community. But I'm also really passionate about social stability and sustainability of local communities. I live in a rural area, these places can be tough places to live. And if we're all just spending all life online and not engaging with real people, but we're just engaging with computers, then that is going to destroy something about life on these islands, which has been going on um for hundreds of years in a very positive community-focused way. And so as the government starts bringing in AI in all these different parts of our community, our economy, our society, we want to try and think about doing that in a way that's really thinking about our needs rather than just people who might be trying to sell us services or or have the needs of other countries in mind. So that's kind of what it's about. Um what where we'll get to, I don't know, but we're hoping to get just asked in different questions, get politicians thinking in a slightly different way, making them think about things that other people don't want to say or forget to say, and reminding them about how this might really impact people who live here and making sure it works in a way that works best for us, not for other countries.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and this transcends political parties, I would imagine. Even though some of the examples you gave me were, I think I heard quite a few conservative party politicians, but pretty much it doesn't matter. If someone's out of government and they have an opportunity to profit from it, there are rules around that, right?
SPEAKER_02So if you come out of a government administration and then want to go and work in a military space, there's loads of really tough rules. One of the things we're sort of saying is we've now got to think about AI in that way. You can't just have regular lobbying rules around people going to work for tech companies, foreign tech companies. Actually, you've got to think about this in a different way. Very party politically neutral. Some of this agenda are things that you'd find in a conservative manifesto, some of it you'd find in a labor manifesto, and some of the digital sovereignty, I suppose, might even be in some of the reform manifesto, which is our new right-wing party here. I mean, we don't really associate with any of these parties, but the point is that there are valid points which might fit anywhere on the political spectrum. And that makes sense because there's nearly 70 million people here who will have different views all across the political spectrum and have different needs. But AI will impact all those needs in different kinds of ways. And we want people to think about that politically neutral, all the different kinds of things we might need.
SPEAKER_01Will this manifesto also uh serve as a pretty good template for other countries? You mentioned that we're in a difficult time right now politically, and probably from the international norms and the approach that we've taken to work with one another has changed since after the World War II. And that world seems quite different now. There's a lot of good stuff in that manifesto, and I read it. I imagine that if that took flame in other countries, uh a similar approach, that it could be beneficial. It actually could probably help your efforts in the UK, as it would in other countries as well. Or do you not see it that way?
SPEAKER_02Like I'd like to think so. I mean, there are some specific, uniquely weird things about these little islands that we live on here that are quite bespoke to the UK. But there's an awful lot of it which is fairly classic liberal democracy. Now, liberal democracy is getting a bad wrap nowadays, so maybe that's not so good. But I would have thought that there's lots of stuff in here which would ring true with lots of people who are worried about AI being good, safe, positive, beneficial. Let's get the good stuff, let's minimize the risks of the bad stuff, and let's really try and think about it in a way that tide that lifts all boats. I think there are elements of it which probably through a US political lens would be seen as too leftish. But that's just the European political spectrum is just inherently further to the left than the US political spectrum. You're absolutely right that I think would resonate with a lot of people in a lot of countries, while also just reminding our government to think about this country and what we might need in this moment.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Wanted to get in the last few minutes we had, just because it's topical and it's uh timely, wanted to get your opinion of the Olympics are going on right now in Milan. And uh today, this morning, in the New York Times, I read quite an interesting article about how performers, so skaters, folks that are like figure skaters, there's a couple of examples of like a Canadian pair, the Joy and Laga, I think is the name. They're a Canadian pair. They wanted to do their routine, their choreography, to some music from the Australian band ACDC. And they did not want to break any copyright laws or anybody's copyright, so they sought uh permission for that. But they had spent months putting together their routine to that to a song from ACDC, and that copyright clearance did not come in time. And they did the right thing, they pivoted to a new song, but it affected their performance. Another example is Amber Glenn, who is a U.S. skater, and she did not receive approval, didn't know she needed it. And there's a Canadian singer, Seb McKinnon, who accused her of copyright infringement afterwards, and she felt like she was like completely lost. That, you know, I didn't know about this, I didn't know that was an issue. They worked out their differences, but it became a spat for a while until they figured it out. Another skater went on social media, wanted to do a routine to the music from minions, and uh and that, you know, that didn't come in. So they went to social media, they broadened the audience, they sort of widened the circle. And because of that, that caused them to get the protection they needed just in time. So what can just regular people do so that they're aware that they need to get permission? How should they handle something that is complex and confusing? Sometimes it requires multiple parties to approve of it. Yeah, they're trying to do the right thing, but what can make it simple, what can simplify it for them?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so this is really interesting. I think this is an issue the copyright marketplace, not copyright law. Like if I want to buy copyrights, where do I go shopping? And why has no one created a solution to that? It must be possible. Attempts have been made in previous types of technology around collective licensing, where you can buy blanket licenses to a whole load of works. You know, you go, you know, an organization you could go and buy a blanket license for performing and playing that work in that venue. So there are solutions out there. But you know, when you think about the performer of the skater and then being affected by that issue, I also think about the performer of the violinist in the orchestra that played the music. They've got rights too, and they need to earn a living, and that was their performance, and that was their one off it, and that was where they earn their money and their living. So it's got to be a recognition of both sides. And it's copyright, it is content is slippery and it's evasive, but it's incumbent on all of us who care about it to try and make the marketplace work better and respect the rights for everyone rather than say, oh, well, there's an exception for the Olympics because skaters should. I don't see the public justification for an exception for the Olympics. I just don't see well, the Olympics is making a huge amount of money, it's a highly profitable organization. The media rights are worth a huge amount of money, the sponsors and advertisers paying a huge amount of money, everyone's making money out of the Olympics. Why should the violinist in the orchestra who played the song for the ice skating last night be the only person who doesn't get paid? I don't understand that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I would agree with you. And I it's interesting because when you heard the IOC and the International Olympic Committee, they commented on it. They said we're aware of the issue, but that was the extent of their comment. They didn't say we'll help, they didn't say we're more concerned about it. It was just we're aware of the issue.
SPEAKER_02Given the amount of money they're making out of the Olympics, they should be making sure that all the rights are cleared for the music that's needed for the show that they're trying to put on. I mean, I just feel like Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Well, I come from a family of former entertainers and folks that are very active in the field, and it's about fairness and doing the right thing. I was impressed that several of the skaters really cared about it, didn't want to violate any copyrights and change their actual routine. Or felt very bad about it and then worked it out afterwards as well.
SPEAKER_02So I and I feel bad that the market isn't working well enough for them to have an easier answer than that. Like it should be should work, and surely the technology may exist to make that work better.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I I know with the little time that we have, I just wanted to conclude with thanking you, but asking one more question. Copyrights are quite unique and they're precise, and uh it's a specialty. It probably shouldn't be because they're, you know, the need for an understanding of copyrights is absolutely everywhere. Every time we pick up our phone, go on the internet, do something. But I noticed that you studied copyrights at King's College, London. What drew you, what caused you to be interested in the field? And uh, has it been as enjoyable as you had expected?
SPEAKER_02So when I was a kid, I was a singer and I was very lucky to sing and I sang professionally, and I did concerts and tours and traveled around the world and had an exposure to what it was like to be a performing artist and to earn money as a musician. And at the bottom of the page of all of our sheets of music were these copyright notices saying, you know, you must not copy. And I remember asking someone like what this all meant, and why was this important and why couldn't we copy our music? Because it'd be quite helpful if you weren't sharing copies. And someone said to me, It's an ecosystem. If we're gonna get paid for our concert tonight, we've got to pay the person you wrote the music, we've got to pay the person you printing the music, and as long as everyone's paying, then we can carry on doing what we're wanting to do. And a few years later, Napster came along, the internet started getting invented, and all my friends were sort of downloading songs from Napster for free. And I remember this isn't this isn't like right. Like, I'm like, Well, who's gonna pay these musicians? And I wasn't my voice broke, I got old, I couldn't sing as well, and so I wasn't really doing music anymore. But I kind of felt like this isn't quite working, and so I thought I wanna I want to understand this, and I started asking, you know, what is this all about? And someone explained to me about intellectual property law and copyright, and I just became really fascinated. And that this is a topic. And I thought, how are we gonna make all of this work? This is gonna be the defining challenge, like for my generation. I really want to spend my life figuring all of this stuff out. So the course I did at King's was really interesting, comparative copyright. It took UK, German, French, EU, and US copyright law, and we looked at all the concepts alongside each other and how the law is slightly different, and the French tradition around author's right and moral rights, which is what's really driven the really long-term protection, the UK law around property and like being much more utilitarian and building a market, and then how the US adapted that and brought in fair use doctrine and merged it with free speech and the different kinds of ways of thinking about it. First sale doctrine, slightly different than exhaustion. These comparative concepts were really interesting as I grew up in a world where everything was becoming global. And then I got working in global companies and starting to do these cross-border deals and see things from all these different perspectives. So it's a huge challenge. We're living in an information economy, a world dominated by content and by creativity, but we're also seeing the political power of content. Here we are, 500 years after CUP was founded by King Henry VIII, and we're seeing the world's strongest and most powerful men trying to control the internet, trying to control content, trying to control information, whether for wealth, power, political gain, all over again. It's the same story.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02It took copyright to try and fix that story, and I think we're forgetting those lessons learned. And one thing I've I've written about a bit before is this thing called the Florence Treaty, UNESCO Treaty, you know, after the Second World War. The world's economy the major powers passed a treaty to eliminate tariffs on books because they believed it was fundamentally important to maintain peace. We have to share information, knowledge, learning, and research among peoples so we can learn about each other's nations, cultures, stories, really is share that as freely and easily as we possibly can. And as we now move into a world where people are putting up tariffs again, erecting borders, saying that we're going to push the fair use doctrine through because the US has got to be China in some geopolitical struggle around AI, we're weaponizing content all over again and we're using it for individual needs, power, and control, and we are forgetting what we've learned. And I want my kids and the generations that follow to be able to live in a kind of world full of high-quality books, knowledge, learning, and research. And I want to do what I can in what's left of my career to try and create a policy environment that enables that to continue.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, agreed. And I know that was so important to you, too. You even named a child Florence. Yeah. My youngest sort of cool for well, you you know, would you be breaking any copyrights if you sang for us?
SPEAKER_02You don't want me to do that. Well, it's quite good. Maybe you got I got to go and get him from school now. He'd do a better job than no one's listening to me sing.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much. Incredibly interesting. Just following you and learning about you and the expertise that you have and your willingness to share this with others is so incredibly important. So thank you so much. I'm going to continue to follow books don't grow on trees. I was really fascinated about politics and freedom of speech and freedom of expression. And I think you're a voice we need to hear. You're a Cassandra for the world. And so really appreciate that. And I hope that you'll join us again. And it's great to make your acquaintance and become your friend.
SPEAKER_02Well, well, thank you for the time. And I know there'll be maybe people listening to everything I've said, but partly I'm trying to create a different kind of conversation and provoke some thoughts.
SPEAKER_01So maybe that's fine. People don't have to agree, but the fact that we're airing it out. And one last thing you know, humans tend to be humans, whether we're in the 1500s, 1600s, or the 21st century. Unfortunately, human nature doesn't always change. So we have to continue to work in the trenches as you're doing to sort of make the world a better place. Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me.