On Wednesday 28 January, the members of the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs approved the own-initiative report by Axel Voss (EPP, German) by 17 votes to 3, with 2 abstentions. They called on the European Union to protect artists, the media and other creators from the impact caused by artificial intelligence services.
They believe that any use of their content should be “subject to their authorisation and duly remunerated”. In particular, the elected representatives want European copyright rules to apply to all generative AI available in the EU, regardless of the country or countries in which it was designed and trained.
This implies that AI services “clearly inform rights holders when they use their content, and pay them fair remuneration, failing which they will be penalised if they fail to do so”.
In their view, this requires “adequate remuneration” and full control over the use of their content in AI training and data aggregation, including the right to object. Holders of rights to protected content must be able to refuse the training of artificial intelligence (AI) and automated data mining.
Given that these systems rely on and reproduce copyrighted content, MEPs want full transparency about their use, as well as a list of every copyrighted work used and detailed records of the exploration activities carried out by AI providers and developers. “Failure to comply with transparency requirements should be equivalent to copyright infringement, for which AI providers could face legal consequences”.
Parliament also called on the Commission and the Member States to protect media pluralism, “threatened by AI systems that selectively aggregate information, diverting its traffic and revenues”. They believe that the news media sector must have full control over the use of its content for training AI systems, including the possibility of refusing such use.
The own-initiative report will be submitted to the March plenary session.
Link to the report: https://aeur.eu/f/kgn (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)