MEPs have adopted recommendations aimed at protecting copyrighted creative work from use by artificial intelligence. They believe that EU copyright law should apply to all systems of generative artificial intelligence on the EU market, regardless of where the AI model was trained.
Remuneration and transparency
MEPs say that the use of copyrighted material by genAI must be fairly remunerated to protect the EU’s creative sector, which generates 6.9% of the EU’s gross domestic product. They also want the Commission to examine how remuneration for past use can be facilitated. However, they do not want a global licence for providers to train their generative AI systems in exchange for a flat-rate payment.
MEPs also stress the importance of full transparency for the use of protected content by genAI. They want AI providers and deployers to provide an itemised list of all copyrighted works used to train AI and detailed records of crawling activities for inference and retrieval-augmented generation (this doesn’t sound entirely realistic). They say that the lack of these could be perceived as copyright infringement, triggering legal consequences for AI providers and deployers. If such a court case is then decided in favour of the rightsholder, AI providers or deployers should have to bear all legal costs and related expenses.
Licensing market and opt-out from training
MEPs want the Commission to create a new licensing market for copyrighted material, including voluntary collective licensing agreements per sector, which would include individual creators and small and medium-sized enterprises. They want to make sure rightsholders can exclude their work from being used in AI training and they suggest that the European Union Intellectual Property Office could manage such an opt-out list.
Protection for news media sector
In addition, MEPS have asked the Commission to protect the press and news media sector whose work is regularly exploited by AI systems. News media outlets whose traffic and revenues are diverted by AI systems should be fully compensated and they should also have the right to refuse use of their content for training AI systems. MEPs say that the aggregation of news content must ensure media pluralism and diversity of information, avoiding the selective processing of information or self-preferencing practices by gatekeepers benefiting their AI services.
Content created by AI and individual protection
Finally, MEPs say that content fully generated by AI should not be protected by copyright. They also want to make sure individuals are protected from dissemination of manipulated and AI-generated content and stress the obligation of digital service providers to act against such illegal use.
