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02 May 2025 / Ciara Cullen , Joshy Thomas , Emma Dunnill
Issue: 8114 / Categories: Features , Artificial intelligence , Copyright , Intellectual property , Technology , Regulatory
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Copyright, AI & onions

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Don’t cry! Ciara Cullen, Joshy Thomas & Emma Dunnill peel back the many layers of content scraping & copyright
  • The interaction between AI and copyright is both a top news item and the subject of numerous court actions and licensing disputes globally.
  • A UK government consultation on AI and Copyright has recently closed, producing thousands of responses, which the government is currently processing.

‘Copyright law is like an onion—it has many layers, and it will make you cry’ (Caroline Wilson, as retweeted by Tim Berners-Lee).

The lachrymatory interaction between artificial intelligence (AI) and copyright remains both a top news item and the subject of numerous court actions and licensing disputes globally. The main issue stems from the way that the majority of generative AI (gen AI) models, such as ChatGPT, have been and are trained. The use of works scraped from the internet for training is alleged to infringe copyright in the works of content creators. A key separate issue, also the

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Secondments, disciplinary procedures and appeal chaos all feature in a quartet of recent rulings. Writing in NLJ this week, Ian Smith, barrister and emeritus professor of employment law at UEA, examines how established principles are being tested in modern disputes
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A High Court ruling involving the Longleat estate has exposed the fault line between modern family building and historic trust drafting. Writing in NLJ this week, Charlotte Coyle, director and family law expert at Freeths, examines Cator v Thynn [2026] EWHC 209 (Ch), where trustees sought approval to modernise trusts that retain pre-1970 definitions of ‘child’, ‘grandchild’ and ‘issue’
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