Lead member
Baroness Kidron
Crossbench, Life peer
Lords
Decision
Not moved
The amendment was not moved. The House was not invited to take a decision on it (though it may have been debated with other amendments).
Amendment text
After Clause 132
insert the following new Clause—
“Transparency of crawler identity, purpose, and segmentation
(1)
The Secretary of State must by regulations make provision requiring operators of web crawlers and general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) models to disclose information regarding the identity of their crawlers, including but not limited to—
(a)
the name of the crawler,
(b)
the legal entity responsible for the crawler,
(c)
the specific purposes for which each crawler is used,
(d)
the legal entities to which they provide data scraped by the crawlers they operate, and
(e)
a single point of contact to enable copyright holders to communicate with them and to lodge complaints about the use of their copyrighted works.
(2)
The information disclosed under subsection (1) must be available on an easily accessible platform and updated at the same time as any change.
(3)
The Secretary of State must by regulations make provision requiring operators of web crawlers and general-purpose AI models to deploy distinct crawlers for different purposes, including but not limited to—
(a)
web indexing for search engine results pages,
(b)
general-purpose AI model pre-training, and
(c)
retrieval-augmented generation.
(4)
The Secretary of State must by regulations make provision requiring operators of web crawlers and general-purpose AI models to ensure that the exclusion of a crawler by a copyright holder does not negatively impact the findability of the copyright holder’s content in a search engine.
(5)
The Secretary of State must lay before Parliament a draft of the statutory instrument containing regulations under this section within six months of the day on which this Act is passed and the regulations are subject to the affirmative procedure.”
Member's explanatory statement
This amendment would require operators of internet crawlers and general-purpose AI models to be transparent about the identity and purpose of their crawlers; operate distinct crawlers for different purposes; and not penalise copyright holders who choose to deny scraping for AI by downranking their content in, or removing their content from, a search engine.