London (AFP) – Over 1,000 musicians including Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, and Damon Albarn on Tuesday released a silent album in protest at proposed changes to UK copyright law around artificial intelligence (AI), which they say will legalize music theft. “Is This What We Want,” featuring recordings of empty studios and performance spaces, is part of a growing backlash against the government’s plans.
Writers and musicians including Bush also denounced the proposals as a “wholesale giveaway” to Silicon Valley in a letter to The Times newspaper on Tuesday. Other signatories included Paul McCartney, Elton John, Ed Sheeran, Dua Lipa, and Sting, as well as writers Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Morpurgo, and Helen Fielding. In a very rare move, UK newspapers also highlighted their concerns, launching a “Make it Fair” campaign featuring wrap-around ads on the front of almost every national daily, with an inside editorial by the papers’ editors.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government is considering overhauling the law to allow AI companies to use creators’ content on the internet to help develop their models, unless rights holders opt out. But artists say opting out will be difficult and onerous. Album organizer Ed Newton-Rex said musicians were “united in their thorough condemnation of this ill-thought-through plan.” “The government’s proposal would hand the life’s work of the country’s musicians to AI companies, for free, letting those companies exploit musicians’ work to outcompete them,” he said. “It is a plan that would not only be disastrous for musicians but that is totally unnecessary. The UK can be leaders in AI without throwing our world-leading creative industries under the bus,” he added.
The album’s release was timed to coincide with the end of the government’s public consultation on the proposed changes. Starmer has previously said the government needs to “get the balance right” with copyright and AI while noting the technology represented “a huge opportunity.” Authors have also spoken out about the UK government’s plans. Bestselling US writer Scott Turow last week criticized the “cavalier attitude of the British government,” which he said proposed to “allow big tech companies to scrape all of our books and repackage our words as ‘original content’.”
“Instead of trying to prevent this, the British government wants to give them a free pass. That will be catastrophic, not just for writers in the UK, but all over the world,” he wrote in the Daily Mail. In a rare interview last month, McCartney, 82, one of the two surviving members of The Beatles, told the BBC that any new legislation had to protect creative thinkers and artists, warning, “you’re not going to have them” without that. “You get young guys, girls, coming up, and they write a beautiful song, and they don’t own it, and they don’t have anything to do with it. And anyone who wants can just rip it off,” he said.
“The truth is, the money’s going somewhere … Somebody’s getting paid, so why shouldn’t it be the guy who sat down and wrote ‘Yesterday’?” In 2023, UK music contributed £7.6 billion to the UK economy, with exports of UK music reaching £4.6 billion.
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