Beeban Kidron

Baroness Beeban Kidron (born 1961) is a British film director — “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason,” “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit” — who became one of the country’s most effective legislative campaigners on technology. Appointed a crossbench peer in 2012, she founded the 5Rights Foundation and helped write the Age Appropriate Design Code that reshaped how tech platforms treat children.

The Lords rebellion over AI training

In 2025 Kidron became the parliamentary face of Britain’s creative industries in their fight over the Data (Use and Access) Bill. The Labour government favoured a copyright regime that would let AI firms train on creators’ work unless rights-holders opted out; Kidron tabled amendments requiring AI companies to disclose exactly which copyrighted material they used. The House of Lords passed her transparency amendment repeatedly and by large margins — including a 272-to-125 vote in May 2025 — sending the bill back to the Commons in a prolonged standoff.

She mobilised an unusually broad coalition. An open letter she helped rally drew hundreds of artists — Paul McCartney, Dua Lipa, Elton John, Kate Bush and others — warning that the government’s plan would hand creators’ livelihoods to AI companies for free.

Kidron’s objection is not to AI itself but to what she casts as an expropriation: forcing artists to subsidise the machines that compete with them. Her amendments centred on transparency — the argument that creators cannot enforce any right, or negotiate any licence, without first knowing what has been taken.