The British Equity Collecting Society (BECS) today announced decisive action to safeguard the rights of its members, audiovisual performers, whose recorded performances are used without consent or payment to train artificial intelligence systems.
AI developers have used performers’ recorded work to train their systems and generate new content. In the UK, this practice infringes performers’ exclusive rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Across the European Union, it similarly breaches performers’ exclusive rights. Despite this, some AI developers have attempted to justify such use under the EU text and data mining exception set out in Article 4 of Directive (EU) 2019/790 and its national implementations.
At BECS’ recent Annual General Meeting, members voted overwhelmingly to grant the organisation a clear mandate to defend their rights in relation to AI training. As part of this mandate, BECS has formally exercised an opt out from the EU Article 4 text and data mining exception on behalf of its members.
The BECS opt out can be found here.
This opt out unequivocally asserts that audiovisual performers reserve the exclusive right to authorise or refuse the reproduction of their performances for text and data mining within the EU. This sends a clear message that: AI developers may not use BECS members’ performances for training or incorporate them into AI-generated outputs without explicit permission.
This is an essential and timely step towards ensuring that performers retain control over their work in the face of rapidly advancing technologies. Nonetheless, BECS stresses that further urgent political action is required to ensure a fair and sustainable balance between the rights of human creators and performers, and the commercial interests of the technology companies whose systems rely on their work – often to produce content that may ultimately compete with them.
Tayyiba Nasser, BECS CEO stated: “Our performers pour their craft, their voice, and often a part of their identity into the work they create. That work should never be taken for granted. This opt‑out makes our position unequivocal: our members’ performances cannot be reproduced or repurposed without clear authorisation, fair remuneration, and full transparency.
We support innovation, but it must respect the people whose creativity fuels it. We urge policymakers and developers to work with us to put those principles at the heart of how AI is built and deployed.”
BECS Members Sanjeev Bhashkar O.B.E. and Meera Syal D.B.E. added: “In the rapidly changing technology of AI, it’s essential that we have the legal and moral right to choose if and how our voice, likeness and works are used to create, train or further any AI models. We totally support the BECS mandate to safeguard all its members.”
