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WGGB welcomes government report on copyright, AI

March 19, 2026

The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) – the trade union representing professional writers across TV, film, theatre, radio, books, poetry, and video games – has welcomed the UK government’s report on copyright and AI released on March 18th.

WGGB General Secretary Ellie Peers said: “Copyright and AI is an issue of huge importance to our members who have seen the industrial-scale theft of their work to train Large Language Models. We therefore welcome the fact that the Government has rowed back on its original preferred ‘opt-out’ copyright exception model, and listened to the voices of thousands of creators, including many of our members. This is a win for collective action.”

“The UK has a robust copyright system in place and yet we know that it is being flouted by Big Tech. Transparency measures are vital to enforce existing legal protections, and we welcome the Government’s recognition of this.”
“It is reassuring to hear the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology say that the Government will help creatives (including independent and smaller creative organisations) control how their work is used and to ensure that they will be paid fairly, and that the Government’s four-strand work programme includes ‘Creator control and transparency’ and ‘Independent creatives’.”
“Yesterday’s announcement is a step in the right direction on the road to a fair system that will protect and reward writers and other creators in an age of Artificial Intelligence, but there is much work that still needs to be done to strengthen not weaken UK copyright law and writers need certainty around protection of their work as a matter of urgency. We are pleased to see a commitment from the Government to further research, monitoring and engagement to get this right, and we will continue to play an active role in this,” Peers concluded.

Categories: AI, Articles, Policy, Regulation

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