Creative industries have been given a fresh boost in their fight to stop Big Tech companies "stealing" their work, writes Ryan Hooper.

US-based cyber-security firm Cloudflare has introduced a tool which blocks Silicon Valley giants from mining creative works for free.

Titans of entertainment, including Elton John, Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Dua Lipa, have been locked in a battle with UK ministers as artists demand better protection from the bots.

The British government last month defeated an amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill by Beeban Kidron, director of Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason. But Cloudflare's latest innovation will give publishers and website owners greater control over their intellectual property, allowing them to choose whether they want AI companies to access their content.

Stephanie Cohen, Cloudflare's chief strategy officer, said the goal of such tools was to ensure a sustainable "ecosystem" for content creators as well as AI companies.

"The change in traffic patterns has been rapid, and something needed to change. This is just the beginning of a new model for the internet," she said.

Cloudflare will enable domains signing up to its tool to state if permission is granted for bots to mine what is on the screen - effectively allowing creators to block AI crawlers from scraping from that site.

Simply, they will now be able to choose if they want AI companies to access their content at all.

Kidron hailed Cloudflare's innovation as "great news". She told the Mail: "This is a radical departure from the current stand-off between the tech sector and copyright holders.

"Cloudflare sit at the heart of the digital world, and it is exciting to see them take decisive action."

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