Don’t look over your shoulder, but the government is selling the creative industries down the river. On December 17th, in the run-up to Christmas, when most people were busy celebrating, Keir Starmer stuck two fat fingers up at every artist, musician, writer and performer trying to earn a crust from their trade. That day, the government launched a consultation which outlined their preferred route regarding text and data mining, allowing AI companies to train on copyright material unless rights are expressly reserved (by machine readable format) despite the fact that there is no workable method of doing that. The Government is planning to allow big tech firms to ignore traditional copyright rules when training their AI systems.