
Following a meeting of our Board on Wednesday 8th January 2025 The BPPA has joined the UK based Creative Rights in AI Coalition as a member organisation. We will be submitting our objections to the Intellectual Property Office’s Consultation on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence.Â
We would urge our members and anyone else who believes that the creative industries will be seriously adversely affected by the IPO’s proposals to also object before the deadline on the 25th of February 2025. Use this link to register your opposition.
Along with our formal objection, The BPPA is issuing the following statement:
There are many reasons, both economic and aesthetic, why the proposed new exemption should be opposed outright by creators. We are confining our remarks here to the rights and ethical obligations of our members.
We are the eyes of the public. They see through our eyes what they cannot see through theirs. They trust us to bear witness to the truth. We cannot betray their trust. This we would do if we in any way allow our authentic press photographs to be used to create photorealistic fake news. It is not just our reputations at a stake here, but the fundamentals of participating in a democratic society.
For these reasons we are opposed to any exception to copyright law permitting such abuse. The proposed opt-out procedure is both wrong in principle and impractical. Our rights should not be taken away subject to retrieval. They should not be taken away in the first place. As has been said elsewhere, shopkeepers should not have to opt out of shoplifting.
This is also impractical for a number of reasons, including the following. Countless thousands of our photographs are already online and there is no way of excepting these from the proposed exception. It is no argument to say they have already been stolen in the past. They are still there available for AI abuse today and for years to come. For the future, our members take thousands of photographs each and every day. While software exists, and will become more widely available, permitting a reservation to the proposed exception to be inserted into photographic metadata, it is in the nature of news work that so many of our pictures would leave our hands immediately before we have the opportunity to put this into effect. They would then, according to the proposed exception, undoubtedly be considered free to use, and abuse, by all. Moreover such metadata is routinely stripped, and while that is contrary to the law, we have no way of policing or preventing it. If still retained, we would then be dependent on others having both the will and the means to read and abide by reservations to the proposed exception.
The only way through this morass, and to both respect and protect our rights, is for creators to have the right to opt in if they so choose. Our pictures should not be available for AI purposes without our prior permission. We should not be placed in the position of having to go to court, for which we in any case do not have the means, to restore the rights taken from us. Furthermore we are not attracted by the offer of financial compensation for unethical abuse through Generative AI.
The Board of The BPPA, January 2025