The following statement was made to the House of Lords committee on Large Language Models and Generative AI by the Financial Times:
‘The developers of LLMs have, without authorisation, used the intellectual property of publishers as part of the corpus of data to train their systems and - unless technical measures are taken to prevent them from doing so - continue to use it to inform system outputs.
There are legal routes to access our content which the developers of these systems have chosen not to take. The FT is in the market offering text and data mining licences to commercial partners and has been for many years. We have a track record of creating bespoke arrangements and had we been approached by LLM developers for access to our content then we would have entered commercial negotiations, setting the price and terms of a licence - covering both ingestion and usage outputs - according to the value delivered and the costs and risks to our business.
The UK government must take steps now to support publishers to exercise their IP rights. Whilst there are ongoing legal proceedings which will establish case law in this area, this process will likely take years and much damage to publishers, and the broader creative sector, may be done in the interim. Although it is for the courts to interpret the law, a clear statement from government, articulating a policy position to the effect that developers require licences to ingest copyright protected materials for LLM training purposes would support the establishment of genuine, good faith licensing negotiations between rights-holders and LLM developers.’