Putting the Nick in copyright theft

Britain's most famous ex-party-leader-turned-Meta-exec argues that copyright protections would kill AI growth and innovation. Is he the sort of man people want to generate ideas on how the web should work?

by Rob Corbidge

Published: 15:10, 29 May 2025

Being an avowed glutton for the written word, it's seldom that I gleefully anticipate not reading something. Every single meaningful written word that I have not read, in whatever tongue, is a source of faint regret. Like some corporeal LLM, I'd like to have it all filed away, and unlike an LLM, I'd understand context. An impossible dream of course, but every now and again someone makes my theoretical task a little easier: step forward Sir Nick Clegg.

For those not of a persuasion to follow British politics (and I can't blame you) who are wondering why Sir Nick is the target of such arch and wilful ignorance, then allow me to provide an aide-memoire.

Formerly the leader of a centrist political party, the Liberal Democrats, in 2010 he steered them from their usual third-place national election finish into being key power players in a coalition government – a rarity in the UK with its first-past-the-post electoral system.

Joining the coalition and getting some fingertips near the levers of actual government power came at some cost, however. Notably he was - and still is - seen by many as having traded principle for power by dropping a key election pledge important to a lot of his support in order to enter the corridors of government alongside the Conservative Party.

Thus it was not too much of a surprise when his party were all but wiped out electorally in 2015, although it was somewhat a surprise when he went off to join Facebook in 2018 as vice‑president of global affairs and communications, being eventually promoted to president for global affairs under Meta, prior to leaving at the start of 2025.

Although he rarely gets mentioned in political circles any more for his previous job there – another rare thing in a parliament where the past missteps of previous rivals will be trotted out for decades after – the media and much of the public have not forgotten that he became shorthand for “typical politicians, saying one thing and doing another”.

So why then is he the eye of our particular storm at the moment? Simply because, like many other Big Tech departees before him, he has written a book, and it was during the publicity tour for his soon-to-be-released tome How to Save the Internet that he chose to opine on the Copyright vs AI debate currently alive in our parliament, and opined in such a startlingly predictable way that it cannot pass without at least a measure of contempt from those with publishing in their heart.

The world’s biggest free lunch

To quote The Times: "Making technology companies ask artists’ permission before they scrape copyrighted content will 'basically kill the AI industry in [Britain] overnight,' Sir Nick Clegg has said." 

Essentially, Clegg has come down on the side of those who believe artists and creatives should be required to individually "opt out" from having their work be consumed by AI for training, on the opposing viewpoint to those of us who believe that those doing the data harvesting of intellectual property for their own purposes must ask permission to use it before they do so.

There's more from Clegg: "Quite a lot of voices say ‘you can only train on my content, [if you] first ask’. And I have to say that strikes me as somewhat implausible because these systems train on vast amounts of data."

This makes Clegg's primary argument to be that all the data is out there already, and so it makes no sense to place use protections around any of it. Now, I might not have attended Cambridge University like Clegg, but my Hampshire peasant sense tells me that if you want a thing because you're saying it has no value due to its abundance, then it clearly does have a value because you want it.

If these are Clegg's beliefs, then why does he not just place his new book directly into his envisioned free-for-all space, and allow it to be absorbed and regurgitated by voracious LLMs rather than selling it?

Obviously we all live under the shadow of Big Tech tail swiping us into the null traffic void because we refuse to be strong-armed into allowing them free ranging access to the stuff of our very livelihoods, and it seems to me that Clegg is just the temporary here-today-gone-tomorrow acceptable face of that threat, personally enriched as he has been by Meta's dollar geyser.

Clegg was a politician of a managerial ilk, an ilk which is rapidly losing credibility with sizeable parts of the voting publics. I feel much of what it takes to be such a politician revolves around presenting inevitabilities to the people in a digestible way. Yet no such inevitabilities exist. It is the same case here.

By not reading Clegg's book How to Save the Internet then, I will save myself time, because I only need to see the word "regime" once a week, and as for the regulation it undoubtedly will recommend, having those in the pay of Big Tech making the recommendations is about as unpleasant to me as leaving it to scared politicians or a social media vote.

How to actually save the internet seems – according to the US courts at least - to revolve first around breaking up the two major search and social tech monopolies of which Clegg has long been a party, as well as levelling the ad market and enforcing a reasonable measure of copyright by using laws that already exist and are not uncertain.

Then you just leave it alone and let people do the rest, as they did on the internet before the Platform Age and before awfuls such as Clegg had a say in it.