The European Commission is consulting on the implementation of the AI Act’s obligation for providers of general-purpose AI models to identify and comply with reservation of rights expressed by rightsholders.
The Copyright section of the GPAI Code of Practice helps providers to demonstrate compliance with their obligation under the AI Act to put in place a policy to comply with EU copyright rules.
The GPAI Code of Practice was approved by the Commission as adequate for AI Act compliance. It includes a commitment for signatories to identify and comply with appropriate machine-readable protocols used to express rights reservations on top of a commitment to respect robots.txt and subsequent IETF versions of this standard.
To support the implementation of the AI Act’s obligation and this commitment, the Commission launched a process to facilitate the identification and general agreement on opt-out protocols that can be considered as state-of-the-art, technically implementable, and widely adopted by rightsholders across different cultural and creative sectors (as specified in Measure 1.3. of the Copyright Section of the Code). This process will be organised with the support of the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and the close involvement and input of relevant stakeholder groups.
The consultation asks for views on the technical feasibility and uptake of different Text and Data Mining (TDM) opt-out solutions (identified in the EUIPO study on development of generative AI from a copyright perspective).
Secondly, stakeholders are also invited to express their interest in participating in follow-up workshops to discuss opt-out protocols that the Code signatories and other providers must respect in the context of the AI Act. The Commission will facilitate exchanges between stakeholder groups with to reach a general agreement on a list of such protocols. Signatories to the GPAI Code of Practice (CoP) will be invited by default to these meetings.
Following these discussions, the Commission will publish the list of generally-agreed machine-readable opt-out solutions. This list will be reviewed regularly, at least every two years, in line with the updates to the Code of Practice.
The consultation ends on 9 January 2026.
