SCL

The UK government has issued its report and impact assessment on AI and copyright under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025. This follows the recent report by the House of Lords Communications and Digital Sleect Committee. In a written statement to the UK parliament, Liz Kendall, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology highlighted the key parts of the report, which runs to 150 pages. In late 2024, the UK government consulted on copyright and AI.

The Adovcate General has recently issued his opinion in the joined Cases C-496/23 P | Meta Platforms Ireland v Commission (Facebook Marketplace) and C-497/23 P | Meta Platforms Ireland v Commission (Facebook Data). He advises the Court of Justice to dismiss Meta’s appeals concerning an ongoing EU investigation into potential abuse of a dominant position relating to the use of Facebook data and the Facebook Marketplace service.

UK government to consult on child safety measures in March The UK government has said that it will crack down on illegal content created by AI by requiring AI chatbot providers to comply with the illegal content duties in the Online Safety Act. It emphasises that the distribution of nude images of children is already illegal. However, the government will also consult on how best to ensure tech companies can safeguard children from sending or receiving such images in the first place.

The European Commission has sent a statement of objections to Meta, setting out its preliminary view that Meta has breached EU antitrust laws by excluding third party AI assistants from accessing and interacting with users on WhatsApp. The Commission considers that this risks blocking competitors from entering or expanding in the growing market for AI assistants. Therefore, the Commission intends to impose interim measures to prevent this policy change causing serious harm to the market.

The First-Tier Tribunal recently issued its ruling in Thomas Elsbury v Information Commissioner & HMRC Neutral citation: [2025] UKFTT 00915 (GRC). The Tribunal was asked to consider a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) about the use of large language models (LLMs) by HMRC. Thomas Elsbury (E) specialises in R&D tax relief claims.

The European Commission is consulting on drafts of a revised Technology Transfer Block Exemption Regulation (TTBER) and revised Technology transfer agreements are agreements by which one firm authorises another to use certain technology rights, such as patents, design rights or software copyrights to produce goods and services.

Following last week’s consultations in response to the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 coming into force, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is now also consulting on guidance on distributed ledger technologies. Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) such as blockchain, seek to store, synchronise and maintain digital records across a network of computing centres.

Ofcom has announced that it is investigating Duplanto Ltd, which runs a porn site, in relation to the age-check requirements under the Online Safety Act. Since 25 July, sites that allow users to upload pornographic content have been required to use highly effective age assurance to prevent children from accessing that material. Ofcom says that it has been closely scrutinising companies’ compliance since this requirement came into force.

With all the excitement over the EU’s AI Act and the UK’s data protection reforms, there is another piece of legislation coming into force soon which may have been somewhat overlooked – the EU’s so-called Data Act. It’s quite a complex piece of legislation and if you start looking into it you’ll end up down a rabbit hole, so we’ll try to keep things simple in this article.

In response to the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 (DUAA) coming into force, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is consulting on two pieces of new guidance on: ‘recognised legitimate interest’, which is a new lawful basis for data processing, separate from the legitimate interests lawful basis; and ‘data protection complaints’, which is a new requirement for all organisations to have a process in place for handling data protection complaints.