MEPs on the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee have backed proposals calling for greater transparency and payment for creators when generative artificial intelligence uses copyrighted material.
The committee adopted the proposals by 17 votes to three, with two abstentions, the European Parliament informed in a statement.
MEPs want EU copyright law to apply to all generative AI systems available on the EU market, even if the systems are trained outside the EU.
Generative AI refers to tools that can produce new content such as text, images or audio from patterns learned in training data.
They called for AI providers and deployers to give “full transparency” about copyrighted content used, including a list of each copyrighted work and detailed records of online “crawling” activity used to gather training material.
Failing to meet transparency requirements could amount to copyright infringement, with legal consequences for AI providers, the statement added.
MEPs also called for “fair remuneration” when copyrighted content is used by AI, and asked the European Commission to examine whether payment could apply to past use.
They rejected a “global licence” that would allow companies to train systems in exchange for a flat-rate payment.
News media and AI-generated content
The committee’s report called on the Commission and EU member states to protect media pluralism, saying AI systems can aggregate news selectively and divert traffic and revenues from publishers, according to the statement.
It said news organisations should have control over whether their content is used to train AI systems, including the option to refuse, and should be paid when it is used.
MEPs said content generated entirely by AI should not be protected by copyright.
They also called for measures to protect people from the spread of manipulated and AI-generated content, including an obligation on digital service providers to act against illegal use.
The report also called for new rules on licensing copyrighted material for generative AI, including voluntary collective licensing agreements by sector that are accessible to individual creators and small and medium-sized enterprises, the Parliament said.
It also asked the Commission to explore tools that would allow rightsholders to stop their work being used by general-purpose AI systems.
German MEP Axel Voss, the rapporteur for the report, stated: “If copyrighted works are used to train AI systems, creators are entitled to transparency, legal certainty, and fair compensation.”
The report is due to be put to a vote by the full Parliament in plenary in March.
