Copyright and generative artificial intelligence – opportunities and challenges

The European Parliament adopted by 460 votes to 71, with 88 abstentions, a resolution on copyright and generative artificial intelligence - opportunities and challenges.

Current legislation is insufficient

The application of the Copyright and Related Rights Directive in the Digital Single Market remains ambiguous in the context of generative AI training. Members therefore recommended that clarifications regarding its application and implementation be provided swiftly.

Parliament believes that current copyright law is insufficient to address the challenge of licensing copyrighted material for generative AI. It recommended establishing a supplementary legal framework to clarify the licensing rules for generative AI and to combat potential violations of existing copyright law.

Protection of news media

Members also believe that the rights holders in question must have full control over the use of the content they produce for purposes beyond AI training, such as inference and retrieval-augmented generation by systems such as applications. This control should be based on a robust and functioning possibility to exclude such use by AI systems and models, underpinned by full transparency and source documentation over the use of third-party content.

The Commission is invited to:

- study the possibility of protecting the press and news media sector, whose services are regularly exploited on a large scale by AI systems;

- propose mechanisms ensuring that providers of generative AI models or systems that demonstrably divert traffic and revenue from press and news media outlets compensate such outlets in a fair, proportionate and non-discriminatory manner, paying particular attention to local and regional media, in order to safeguard media pluralism, diversity and democratic discourse in the EU and its Member States.

Voluntary Licensing Agreements

The Commission is invited to facilitate the establishment of voluntary collective licensing agreements per sector, where appropriate, as a means to quickly establish a working licensing market that provides a balanced and efficient framework ensuring the fair remuneration of rights holders while enabling AI providers to access high-quality training data. These collective licensing agreements should be accessible to all stakeholders, including individual creators and SMEs, promoting good faith negotiations and transparency. Rights holders’ refusal to have their content used for training purposes must be respected.

The Commission is also asked to assess the feasibility of tools enabling rights holders to effectively exclude the use of their works for AI training in a limited number of machine-readable standardised formats managed by a trusted intermediary. Members proposed that the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) be the trusted intermediary that manages and lists the exclusions.

Compensation and transparency

Parliament called on the Commission to examine whether there is a feasible solution for the immediate, fair, and proportionate remuneration of past uses of copyright-protected works by providers of general-purpose AI models and systems. This applies to the use of copyrighted or related rights content in the absence of a licensing market, an obligation that would remain in place until reforms are adopted. In this regard, Members opposed any proposed framework based on AI providers obtaining a global license for training their generative AI models in exchange for a flat-rate payment.

Rebuttable presumption

The Commission is called on to propose the establishment of a rebuttable presumption that, for any generative AI model or system placed on the EU market, works and other subject matter protected by copyright or related rights have been used for the purposes of training, inferencing or retrieval augmented generation, where the transparency obligations set out in this resolution have not been fully complied with. Where a rights holder or the organisation representing them succeeds in legal proceedings either on the basis of this presumption or through submitted evidence, any reasonable and proportionate legal costs should be borne by the provider of the AI model or system, as applicable.

Deepfakes

Parliament called on the Commission to investigate measures to protect individuals against the dissemination of manipulated and AI-generated digital image, audio or video content, including artists’ works and performances, imitating their personal characteristics (deep fakes) without consent. Digital service providers must have a clear obligation to act against this illegal use of an individual’s right to their own body, facial features and voice and intellectual property rights.

Members also stressed the need to clearly label purely AI-generated content in order to monitor the implementation of the transparency obligations by platforms offering creative content in order to detect and signal the existence of AI-generated content to their users. The Commission is called on to issue an EU code of practice on content labelling by the Commission without delay.