UK House of Lords Committee Calls for Reform of AI Copyright Rules, March 2026

The House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee published "AI and copyright and the creative industries" (HL Paper 267) on March 6, 2026. The report is the output of the Committee's inquiry into the legal treatment of copyright-protected works used to train AI models and the rights of creators whose works are used without licence. The report makes recommendations to the UK Government directed at Parliament and HM Government and is not itself binding law.

The Committee examined the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, in particular the text and data mining exception at section 29A, inserted by the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013. The report finds that section 29A's scope is insufficient to address large-scale AI training on copyright-protected material and that current law does not require AI developers to obtain licences before ingesting protected works. The Committee recommends that HM Government introduce legislation requiring AI developers to disclose the training datasets they use and to establish a licensing or remuneration mechanism that compensates rights holders whose works are ingested for AI training.

AI developers that train models on UK-hosted or UK-sourced copyrighted content face potential legislative change if the Government accepts the Committee's recommendations. Rights holders — including music publishers, literary publishers, news organisations, and visual artists — gain a formal parliamentary endorsement of their position that unlicensed AI training constitutes a rights violation. Any legislative change implementing the recommendations would affect the terms on which AI companies can train on UK copyright works and may require them to audit and disclose existing training datasets.

The report's recommendations require Government action to become law. HM Government has not yet formally responded to the report as of March 17, 2026. The Government's response will determine whether legislation follows and on what timeline. Practitioners and AI developers should monitor the Government's formal response, which parliamentary convention requires within 60 days of the report's publication.

Source: House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee, AI, copyright and the creative industries, HL Paper 267, published March 6, 2026. Available at: https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/170/communications-and-digital-committee/publications/. Confirmed March 17, 2026.

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