Speeches by Bryant.

“Copyright obviously works differently in all the different sectors that are covered by the creative industries, but you are absolutely right. Since Queen Anne in 1710 and then Dickens, we have had a very strong understanding of copyright in the UK. It is slightly different from the French understanding under the Napole…”

“Our aim is not to achieve that. There are several parts to the consultation, as you know. There is the text and data mining exception that everybody focuses on, and then opt-in, out-out, the rights reservation issue and the transparency issue. Then there is the other issue, which I think Dr Pavis gave evidence to you a…”

“Well, one possibility is we end up doing nothing but, as I said, that is not an optimal solution. We are trying to incentivise and engender a technical solution. I am not so sure that it is as impossible as some are suggesting. I went to the Daily Mail group last week and a lot of British newspaper houses have signed u…”

“It won’t just be us. It will be us working with everybody else. I suspect that this will be an ongoing process of debate and consultation.”

“No, I don’t think so, honestly. As you know, I am in two Departments, and I am meeting a lot of people on this subject. Feryal Clark and I have pretty much divided the labour, in the sense that she is mostly seeing the AI companies and I am mostly seeing the creative industries, but we have a couple of roundtables comi…”

“Unless they are required by law to have transparency about their inputs and their outputs. They have to say what URLs they have searched to come to their conclusion as part of the large language model training and their outputs. In other words, when it comes up with the fact that it has created a picture or a story for…”

“Indeed, economic and moral rights have always been part of the combination that makes for copyright—so your consent and your remuneration. They are two separate things. Of course, copyright has always had a series of different exemptions for all sorts of different purposes. As I say, my biggest anxiety is that if we do…”

“That already requires legislation for the territoriality issue. That is my point. The status quo of just doing nothing is not an option for us. The question is what package of—”

“That is precisely our intention.”

“I presume she considers, therefore, that the EU is already in breach. In the best of all possible worlds, the major economic blocs—the United States of America, ourselves, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe—at least all proceed together in the same direction. That is the best way of proceeding with trying to nav…”

“There is always a danger. I can’t remember who I was talking to last week who said that this feels like the Napster moment. Then we ended up with Spotify. Everybody thought that nobody was going to be remunerated for stolen music at all.”

“You can have an argument about whether Spotify remunerates enough. For that matter, an interesting point, Chair, you referred to creators and the AI companies, but in many different sectors there are lots of intermediaries in the way—the record labels or whoever it may be, or collective licensing and so on—and that pla…”

“I can remember that there used to be a row about that. France has always insisted on quotas for music and film and all those kinds of things in French films, but then French cinemas have nobody sitting in them. I am quite hesitant about telling audiences what they must watch. What about “Wicked”? It was made here and h…”

“I have heard the requests for that. I am not the Chancellor of the Exchequer, so I will not be making that commitment today. There are good arguments for it. There are some downsides, too. If you make a film but you cannot distribute it, that is a bit of a problem. “One Life” was probably the most financially successfu…”

“In particular, I hope that we are going to start hearing about a lot of independent films being made that might not otherwise have been made. I think Gurinder Chadha got a mention earlier. I hope I am going to get this right: I think she is making her own version of “A Christmas Carol” at the moment. She was very hesit…”

“I had a horrible feeling when I said it that you were going to ask that question. If we make it too complicated, there is a danger that it is just unusable. Historically, I have come across examples of people saying that they are making a production and that they are based in Wales to meet some kind of quota or other, …”

“It was fine.”

“The point about the apprenticeship levy is really important. If the creative industries are roughly 6% to 7% of the economy, but we are only 2% of the apprenticeships, something has gone wrong[2]. That is writ large in film and television. If you are making a film, it is a project where you are probably recruiting lots…”

“Among the UK’s extraordinary advantages are our history, our language and our communities. Quite often we are at the crossroads of nations. We can make a film like “Slumdog Millionaire” in a way that no other country would be able to do. We need to value that and not undermine it. Diversity comes in many different shap…”

“I do not want us to chop and change all the time for the precise reason that Alastair raised, which is that if you provide uncertainty, people will stop making investments in the future. Take “Conclave”—I spoke to Danny Cohen after I saw “Conclave”, which is one of his films, and to Tessa Ross, who was involved. It was…”