26
2025
Our Responses to the UK Government Intellectual Property Office Consultation: Copyright and Artificial Intelligence
In response to the UK Government Information Commissioner’s Officer Consultation on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence (AI), which ran from 17th December 2024 until 25th February 2025, researchers from across Design Informatics submitted their perspectives through three formal responses, each responding to appropriate relevant questions in the consultation. The outcome of this process will likely shape the future of AI and copyright law in the UK, with significant implications for innovation, content ownership, and intellectual property rights.
You can read the responses in full via the links below:
Design Informatics led the Edinburgh College of Art response to the consultation, drawing on experience and insights from Creative Informatics and the associated Creative AI Demonstrator project, CoSTAR Realtime Lab, and ekip: European Cultural and Creative Sectors and Industries Policy Platform as well as ECA’s own experience as an educator of the next generation of creative professionals, to focus on the need to adopt copyright legislation that will better protect the intellectual property rights, business development (including as AI innovators in their own right), and careers of creative enterprises and practitioners:
Researchers from Bridging Responsible AI Divides (BRAID), from academic organisations across the UK including the Institute for Design Informatics (where the BRAID project is based), combined a range of expert perspectives to examine and comment on the implications of proposed changes in depth, including analysis of current and potential issues, as well as proposals for alternative approaches:
Researchers from Bridging Responsible AI Divides (BRAID), working with colleagues from the Ada Lovelace Institute, and students from the CDT in Designing Responsible NLP provided a response focused specifically on issues surrounding journalism and generative AI – and how insights from a November 2024 expert workshop provide important insights and key considerations around any potential copyright legislation changes:
The DECaDE project (led by the University of Surrey working in partnership with the Institute for Design Informatics and the University of Edinburgh School of Law) focuses on Distributed Ledger Technology (aka `Blockchain’), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Human Data Interaction (HDI). Their response highlighted opportunities for emerging approaches to content provenance (metadata that allows tracing of the origins of content used in AI systems) to better support recognition and tracing of intellectual property:
Image credit: Image of Ben Cantil of DataMind Audio performing under his stage name, Encanti, at the Creative Informatics Creative AI Demonstrator event ‘Exploring the Potential for Creative AI Showcase’ held at Platform, Glasgow, on 28th November 2023. Image credit: Chris Scott.