This 2-hour informal meeting will introduce the work of the newly formed Heritage, Artificial Intelligence & Law (HAIL) Network, a collaborative space to help shape the heritage sector’s engagement with emerging AI law and policy. The Network was created in April 2025 and has over 140 members subscribed in the listserv: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/HAIL.
As recently seen in the UK Copyright & AI Consultation, the heritage sector faces complex issues and lacks meaningful representation in government policy on AI. Copyright policy work has been focusing on creative and technology industries, leaving largely aside the particular challenges and needs of the heritage sector. This is a missed opportunity to engage a sector that controls valuable data for AI training and research, and who can provide equally valuable policy contributions and evidence. Government has partially agreed with Recommendation 13 of the AI Opportunities Action Plan proposes to “establish a copyright-cleared British media asset training data set, which can be licensed internationally at scale … through partnering with bodies that hold valuable cultural data like the National Archives, Natural History Museum, British Library and the BBC to develop a commercial proposition for sharing their data to advance AI”. But it has not been clear how heritage organisations are being consulted on this approach, and it is concerning the lack of meaningful involvement of the sector in its full breadth and diversity in these policy discussions.
We saw an opportunity to fill this gap, and launched HAIL, an interdisciplinary space for practitioners, researchers and other advocates in heritage, technology and legal sectors to voice concerns and excitement around the use and development of AI. The network’s goal is to share information, best practice, publications, calls for evidence, consultations, news and other related events. By combining forces, we will be better able to organise and enable the diverse voices of the heritage sector to more meaningfully contribute to policy debates — and at a crucial moment not only for AI regulation, but also for ensuring the sector’s visibility, representation and resilience.
This meeting will discuss the work undertaken by the HAIL Network so far, including the creation of collaborative trackers for the heritage sector on AI consultation responses and AI policies, and what is on the horizon for the network. Meeting participants will have the opportunity to share their concerns and questions about copyright and AI, with a view to working towards a position paper that reflects the diverse needs of the sector. The HAIL steering group will be there to facilitate the discussion and offer guidance on the complex matters currently addressed by policymakers.
Paula Westenberger is a BRAID Research Fellow, Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law at Brunel University of London, and founder/lead of the HAIL Network. Paula created HAIL as part of her BRAID (AHRC funded) project Responsible AI for Heritage: copyright and human rights perspectives, in partnership with RBG Kew. The need for this interdisciplinary network became clear when, in 2023, Paula led the workshop Mapping out the interface between Cultural Heritage, Artificial Intelligence and Copyright Law in the UK. She has a forthcoming paper in the European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy: Westenberger and Farmaki (2025) Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage Research: the Challenges in UK Copyright Law and Policy, addressing the shortcomings of the UK TDM exception for non-commercial research, and the problematic language of copyright policy making in framing the debates around creative and AI industries, thus not sufficiently contemplating the heritage sector. She has led collaborative responses to recent consultations, i.e. the BRAID Researchers responses to the UK Copyright and AI consultation and to the call for contributions on AI and creativity issued by the UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights. She is currently working on the paper “Decolonising the heritage, AI and copyright interface: a cultural rights approach.”
Harriet Deacon is a Lecturer at the Centre of Excellence for Data Science, Artificial Intelligence and Modelling (DAIM) and a Research Associate at the Wilberforce Institute at the University of Hull. She is interested in the impact and use of AI (and associated intellectual property / data governance considerations) in the creative industries and intangible cultural heritage. She has been involved in an ongoing project about the economics of living heritage safeguarding with UNESCO. Harriet is Principal Investigator on the British-Academy funded DAIL-ICH Project on digital/AI literacy for community data governance in Africa. She organised a roundtable on ICH inventorying, Intellectual Property and Artificial Intelligence in the UK in June 2024 and was co-coordinator of a UNESCO Webinar on Artificial Intelligence and Intangible Cultural Heritage in October 2024. She will reflect on responses to the UK Copyright and AI consultation, including her own, and provide some commentary from an international comparative perspective.
Bartolomeo Meletti is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Law of the University of Glasgow and Head of Knowledge Exchange at CREATe, the Centre for Regulation of the Creative Economy. He co-authored the CREATe response and contributed to the LACA response to the UK Copyright and AI consultation.
Anna-Maria Sichani is a BRAID Research Fellow and a Research Associate in Digital Humanities at Digital Humanities Research Hub, School of Advanced Study, University of London. For her BRAID fellowship Responsible data, models and workflows: Responsible AI digital skills provision for the cultural heritage community, in partnership with The Alan Turing Institute, she is looking at embedding responsible AI literacy skills across the cultural heritage community to empower informed, responsible and ethical use of AI and machine learning. She has co-led with Paula Westenberger the BRAID Researchers response to the UK Copyright and AI consultation and she has recently developed a toolkit on Generative AI, data protection and intellectual property in digital cultural heritage. Her current work focuses on data-intensive research and emerging technologies, including AI, in the arts, humanities, and the wider cultural heritage and information environment, with a focus towards open, responsible, ethical and sustainable research.
Andrea Wallace is Reader at the University of Warwick and UK Director of the GLAM-E Lab (https://www.glamelab.org/). Andrea also co-manages the Open GLAM Survey, now available as an interactive website version (https://survey.glamelab.org/). The GLAM-E Lab is currently studying how online collections and websites are being impacted by activity from AI training bots. The GLAM-E Lab submitted a response to the UK Copyright and AI consultation.
Key references
Ahnert R, Griffin E, Ridge M, and Tolfo G. Collaborative Historical Research in the age of big data. Cambridge University Press (2023). https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/collaborative-historical-research-in-the-age-of-big-data/839C422CCAA6C1699DE8D353B3A1960D
Kizhner I, Terras M et al, “Digital cultural colonialism: measuring bias in aggregated digitized content held in Google Arts and Culture” (2021) 36(3) Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 607-640
Kretschmer M, Meletti B et al, Copyright and AI: Response by the CREATe Centre to the UK Government’s Consultation (2025)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5166928
Levendowski A. How Copyright Law Can Fix Artificial Intelligence’s Implicit Bias Problem Washington Law Review (2018) 93, 579.
Miltner, K. M., Moruzzi, C., Parker, M., Potapov, K., Sichani, A.-M., & Westenberger, P. (2025). BRAID researchers' response to the call for contributions on artificial intelligence and creativity issued by the UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, Alexandra Xanthaki. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15442454
Murphy O and Villaespesa E, THE MUSEUMS + AI NETWORK AI: A Museum Planning Toolkit (Goldsmiths 2020) https://themuseumsainetwork.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/20190317_museums-and-ai- toolkit_rl_web.pdf
Pavis M. Digital Heritage Leadership Briefing: Artificial Intelligence supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund. (2023)https://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/Digital%20Heritage%20Leadership%20Briefing%20-%20Artificial%20Intelligence_English.pdf
Sichani, A.-M., Westenberger, P., Bryan-Kinns, N., Bunz, M., Collett, C., Heravi, B., Miltner, K. M., Moruzzi, C., & Townsend, B. A. (2025). BRAID researchers' response to UK Government copyright and AI consultation. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14945987
Wallace A. (2022) A Culture of Copyright: A scoping study on open access to digital cultural heritage collections in the UK. (Towards A National Collection). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6242611
Westenberger P. and Farmaki D. Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage Research: the Challenges in UK Copyright Law and Policy (forthcoming 2025, European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy) http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5153757
