Copyright and AI: For effective implementation of existing rules

Executive summary
The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) has brought opportunities and challenges to copyright. AI technologies can generate creative content, streamline processes and offer new business models, pushing the boundaries of innovation. On the other hand, this advancement raises complex questions about the protection of creators’ rights, the potential for infringement and the ownership of AI-generated content.

To ensure an effective balance, the European Commission should focus on:

• Careful implementation of the Copyright Directive and AI Act: The Copyright Directive was agreed following heated debates between rightsholders and the tech industry, achieving a delicate balance between their interests. Reopening the legislation after the AI Act’s finalisation would reduce legal certainty for all players – it would fail to resolve any of the current implementation issues, as negotiations would likely take years.
• Operationalising the text-and-data mining (TDM) opt-out: The Commission should continue to support the development of harmonised and internationally recognised standards to ensure a simple and effective opt-out mechanism for all rightsholders and AI model providers, regardless of their size, sector or type of work. Such work should be based on existing, widely used standards rather than the development of new standards.
• Supporting transparency: AI providers must comply with EU copyright laws, including respecting opt-outs, and provide a transparent summary of training data. The training data summary should be sufficiently detailed to be helpful to rightsholders, technically feasible, avoid excessive burden and safeguard trade secrets, confidential business information and model safety.
• Exploring copyright status of AI outputs: AI-generated content without any human intervention should not receive copyright protection. However, AI-assisted content that demonstrates the required level of creative human input may qualify for copyright protection. No legislative changes are necessary as courts will clarify the situation on a case-by case basis.