After an initial positive opinion from the Internal Market Committee and the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament on the AI Act, the favourable vote of the EU Parliament also came on June 14, 2023.
Negotiations will now be started with the EU member states on the final aspect of the Regulation, with the goal of concluding negotiations by the end of the year and proceeding to final approval and entry into force of the Regulation by 2024.
Apart from the issue of Privacy, Copyright protection is one of the major issues at stake in this Regulation.
Issues related to generative AI creations have raised great interest and numerous questions regarding the regulation of the inputs used in the creative process and the protectability as well as the possible authorship of the outputs generated by it.
With this Regulation we see a first attempt to offer an answer to these questions.
Two important obligations for artificial intelligence providers were introduced in the AI Act, namely to:
- indicate the copyrighted content used to train the model
- indicate that the content was produced by an artificial intelligence.
Regarding the first issue, there is a requirement for generative AI developers to provide a detailed summary of the content that was used to train the artificial intelligence to provide authors with the opportunity to verify that the utilized input does not infringe on their copyrights.
Article 29(b)(4) is straightforward on this point:
“Providers of foundation models used in AI systems specifically intended to generate, with varying levels of autonomy, content such as complex text, images, audio, or video (“generative AI”) and providers who specialise a foundation model into a generative AI system, shall in addition
- comply with the transparency obligations outlined in Article 52 (1),
- train, and where applicable, design and develop the foundation model in such a way as to ensure adequate safeguards against the generation of content in breach of Union law in line with the generally-acknowledged state of the art, and without prejudice to fundamental rights, including the freedom of expression,
- without prejudice to Union or national or Union legislation on copyright, document and make publicly available a sufficiently detailed summary of the use of training data protected under copyright law”.
However, an aspect of copyright that is not covered by the regulation concerns the authorship of AI-generated works.
As a result, no changes were introduced compared to Resolution No. 2020/2015 on intellectual property rights and AI-generated technologies in which the European Parliament “Notes that the autonomisation of the creative process of generating content of an artistic nature can raise issues relating to the ownership of IPRs covering that content; considers, in this connection, that it would not be appropriate to seek to impart legal personality to AI technologies and points out the negative impact of such a possibility on incentives for human creators; […] considers that works autonomously produced by artificial agents and robots might not be eligible for copyright protection, in order to observe the principle of originality, which is linked to a natural person, and since the concept of ‘intellectual creation' addresses the author's personality”.
In addition to the Regulation in question, two other initiatives concerning artificial intelligence are moving in parallel: the AI Code of Conduct and the AI Pact.
The AI Code of Conduct which, as communicated by Margrethe Vestager – EU Executive Vice President for Competition and Digital Strategy – will be proposed at the G7.
The EU and the U.S. are working together to develop a voluntary code of conduct for generative AI with the goal of developing non-binding international standards on risk audits, transparency and other requirements for companies developing artificial intelligence systems before the AI Act enters into force.
The AI Pact would cover the creating of non-binding principles on transparency and accountability as an interim solution for the rapidly developing technology. This “pact” would be aimed at companies who develop AI systems in an effort to comply with the rules contained in the AI Act before the regulations enter into force, thereby accelerating the transition.
The news that Google's CEO Sundar Pichai, after a meeting with Thierry Breton, the European Union's internal market commissioner, agreed to work with the European legislators on the AI Pact is a sign that companies are also likely to welcome this non-binding regulation.
Originally Published by 23 June 2023
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