Changes from plenary report to adopted text

The European Parliament,

– having regard to the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, in particular Articles 4, 16, 26, 114, 118 and 179 thereof,

– having regard to Article 17(2) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (the Charter),

– having regard to Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948 (Resolution 217 A), which affirms the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community, the right to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits, and the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary, or artistic production,

– having regard to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, as amended on 28 September 1979, and to the Rome Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations of 26 October 1961,

– having regard to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) of 15 April 1994,

– having regard to Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases (Database Directive),

– having regard to Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society (InfoSoc Directive),

– having regard to Directive 2004/48/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2004 on the enforcement of intellectual property rights,

– having regard to Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ETS No. 009), which guarantees the right to the peaceful enjoyment of possessions and has been interpreted by the European Court of Human Rights as encompassing intellectual property rights, including in the case of Anheuser-Busch Inc. v Portugal (11 January 2007),

– having regard to Directive 2009/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 April 2009 on the legal protection of computer programs,

– having regard to Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation),

– having regard to Directive (EU) 2016/943 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 8 June 2016 on the protection of undisclosed know-how and business information (trade secrets) against their unlawful acquisition, use and disclosure,

– having regard to Regulation (EU) 2018/1807 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 November 2018 on a framework for the free flow of non-personal data in the European Union,

– having regard to Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market and amending Directives 96/9/EC and 2001/29/EC (CDSM Directive),

– having regard to Directive (EU) 2019/1024 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 June 2019 on open data and the re-use of public sector information,

– having regard to Regulation (EU) 2019/1150 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 June 2019 on promoting fairness and transparency for business users of online intermediation services,

– having regard to the Commission White Paper of 19 February 2020 on Artificial Intelligence - A European approach to excellence and trust (COM(2020)0065),

– having regard to the World Intellectual Property Organisation Copyright Treaty and the Revised Issues Paper on Intellectual Property Policy and Artificial Intelligence (WIPO/IP/AI/2/GE/20/1 REV) of 29 May 2020,

– having regard to its resolution of 20 October 2020 on intellectual property rights for the development of artificial intelligence technologies,

– having regard to Regulation (EU) 2022/868 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 May 2022 on European data governance and amending Regulation (EU) 2018/1724 (Data Governance Act),

– having regard to the joint European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles for the Digital Decade of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission of 23 January 2023;

– having regard to Regulation (EU) 2023/2854 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 December 2023 on harmonised rules on fair access to and use of data and amending Regulation (EU) 2017/2394 and Directive (EU) 2020/1828 (Data Act),

– having regard to Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2024 laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence and amending Regulations (EC) No 300/2008, (EU) No 167/2013, (EU) No 168/2013, (EU) 2018/858, (EU) 2018/1139 and (EU) 2019/2144 and Directives 2014/90/EU, (EU) 2016/797 and (EU) 2020/1828 (Artificial Intelligence Act),

– having regard to the report of 9 September 2024 entitled ‘The future of European competitiveness’ by Mario Draghi,

– having regard to the Commission communication of 29 January 2025 entitled ‘A Competitiveness Compass for the EU’(COM(2025)0030),

– having regard to the report of 12 May 2025 of the European Union Intellectual Property Office entitled ‘The Development of Generative Artificial Intelligence from a Copyright Perspective’,

– having regard to the Commission communication of 16 June 2025 entitled ‘State of the Digital Decade 2025: Keep building the EU’s sovereignty and digital future’ (COM(2025)0290),

– having regard to the General-Purpose AI Code of Practice, in particular its copyright chapter, published by the Commission on 10 July 2025 and in force from 2 August 2025,

– having regard to the Explanatory Notice and Template for the Public Summary of Training Content for general-purpose AI published by the Commission on 24 July 2025 and in force from 2 August 2025,

– having regard to the study entitled ‘Generative AI and Copyright – Training, Creation, Regulation’ commissioned by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Justice, Civil Liberties and Institutional Affairs at the request of the Committee on Legal Affairs,

– having regard to Rule 55 of its Rules of Procedure,

– having regard to the report of the Committee on Legal Affairs (A10-0019/2026),

A. whereas the right to property, including intellectual property, is enshrined as a fundamental right in Article 17 of the Charter and has been clearly qualified in case-law; whereas respect for this right must be guaranteed at all stages of the digital transformation and of the development of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI);

B. whereas the EU faces the strategic challenge of lagging behind international developments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI); whereas at the AI Action Summit in February 2025 in Paris, the Commission announced the AI Continent Action Plan, with the objective of making Europe a world leader in AI; whereas it is therefore essential to promote, rather than impede, the advancement of GenAI technologies and services in the public interest within the EU in order to safeguard Europe’s technological sovereignty, competitiveness, multi-linguistic culture, and capacity for innovation while staying true to its values and ensuring that technological development supports sustainable economic growth, competitiveness and innovation while facilitating broad access to AI technologies across the EU; whereas maintaining competitiveness in the race to improve GenAI also requires access to high-quality content, underlining the importance of a fairly remunerated creative sector as a source of high-quality AI training data;

D. whereas the Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles for the Digital Decade established the objective of ensuring a just, safe and secure digital environment, where everyone, including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), should have the possibility to compete fairly and in an innovative way; whereas this entails measures to promote the traceability, safety and compliance of products and services offered on the digital single market; whereas the signatories commit to promoting human-centric, trustworthy and ethical AI systems, used in a transparent way and in line with EU values; whereas the declaration insists that the digital transformation should contribute to a fair and inclusive society and economy, and to promoting cultural and linguistic diversity, as well as to open technologies and standards, as a way to further strengthen trust in technology and consumers’ ability to make autonomous and informed choices;

E. whereas it appears that the EU’s Digital Decade objectives will not be achieved without a transformative shift in its investment landscape;

F. whereas the Competitiveness Compass for the EU intends to boost innovation, in particular by creating a friendly environment for young companies in Europe to start up and expand, under a dedicated EU start-up and scale-up strategy that launched on 28 May 2025; whereas this should be accompanied by an ‘apply AI’ initiative for companies of all sizes to accelerate the integration of AI technologies across strategic sectors and reinforce the EU’s technological sovereignty; whereas the cultural and creative sectors create new and skilled jobs, and contribute to Europe’s economic growth, diplomatic power and the emergence of talents; whereas SMEs comprise the overwhelming majority of businesses in the creative sector;

G. whereas copyright and related rights come into effect automatically without registration requirements; whereas extensive exclusive rights are thus conferred on a variety of holders (authors, performers, producers, publishers and broadcasters), including the rights to reproduce works and other subject matter and to adapt, distribute and communicate them to the public;

H. whereas there is great diversity in European cultural and creative industries, whose contractual practices, value chains, and types of content protected by copyright and related rights differ significantly; whereas in some sectors, rights holders organise collectively to defend their interests; whereas the works produced by this diverse range of actors are equally diverse and can therefore have different values;

I. whereas copyright needs to keep pace with the development of new technologies, both legally and technically; whereas a harmonisation of national copyright regimes would be crucial in a digital world;

J. whereas GenAI is a type of AI that, unlike other AI systems designed to primarily classify or predict, generates new content, such as text, images, music, videos and code, on the basis of training using very large datasets from which they learn patterns and structures; whereas GenAI outputs are created through predictions based on statistical models, generally mimic human creativity and rely on pre-existing content, which may include copyright-protected materials; whereas this digital use of copyright-protected content makes it necessary to adapt the protection of copyrighted content digitally;

K. whereas the development, deployment and use of AI must be fully compliant with the current legal framework; whereas it is unacceptable that these technological developments infringe upon currently established rights; whereas the current systems for the reservation of rights (‘opt out’) to copyright-protected content are often impractical, may not cover all relevant acts of text and data mining, and lack the necessary transparency for effective implementation and enforcement; whereas the development of new technologies such as AI and the upholding of established rights, including those enshrined in copyright law, should not be mutually exclusive, but should rather be advanced together;

L. whereas there is evidence of the widespread violation of copyright rules by GenAI providers, including the unauthorised collection of works from the internet, the non-compliance with rights holders’ text and data mining rights reservations, the use of pirated sources to obtain works, and the failure to seek licences; whereas this pattern, which constitutes a clear violation of creators’ fundamental rights and a misappropriation of value to the detriment of the EU’s cultural and information sector, demonstrates the need for strong measures to ensure that the AI ecosystem in the EU is fair and ethical;

M. whereas key legal questions about the interplay between GenAI and copyright and related rights are whether the use of copyright-protected works and other subject matter in training datasets is lawful under EU and national Member State law, what the legal status of AI-generated content should be, and how to ensure transparency, consent and the fair remuneration of creators and rights holders when their protected works and other subject matter are used in the generation, dissemination and distribution of AI outputs;

N. whereas GenAI, by massively and inexpensively creating content that mimics what was produced by human creativity, competes directly with the work of creators, particularly of cultural and media content; whereas this competition may lead to a decline in the quality of online content as a result of creators disengaging, and thus to an overall decline in human cultural and creative production;

O. whereas this risk of a gradual disappearance of the human dimension of creation in favour of AI-generated content, in addition to undermining the economic viability of the creative sector, poses an existential risk to European society and democracy, in that it blurs the boundaries between truth and falsehood, the perception of discourse and its authors, and disrupts cognitive faculties and critical thinking; whereas the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) takes these risks into account, but cannot be complete without robust protection of copyright and related rights;

P. whereas to ensure proper enforcement of the law and a level playing field across the EU and among AI providers, the EU’s and Member States’ rules on copyright and related rights need to apply uniformly to all AI providers deploying products or offering services within the EU, irrespective of their place of establishment, of the jurisdiction in which the copyright-relevant acts underpinning the training of those AI models take place, and of where the output produced by the AI system is used in the EU; whereas the same requirement should apply mutatis mutandis to any subsequent use of content for inference, retrieval-augmented generation or fine-tuning, not only by providers of AI models, as currently stipulated by Article 53 of the AI Act, but also by providers or deployers of AI systems; whereas entering into new licence agreements should not be misconstrued as redress for past unauthorised uses of copyright-protected content;

Q. whereas any AI provider placing a general-purpose AI model on the EU market must remain responsible for verifying that the measures included in their copyright policy, as outlined in the General-Purpose AI Code of Practice, comply with Member States’ implementation of EU law on copyright and related rights, before carrying out any copyright-relevant act in the territory of the relevant Member State, as failure to do so may give rise to liability under EU law on copyright and related rights;

R. whereas the Code of Practice is only of voluntary compliance, and not all AI providers have signed it, in particular its copyright chapter;

S. whereas the global nature and exponential rate of AI training, deployment and offers on the one hand, and the territorial application of the rules pertaining to copyright and related rights on the other hand, create obstacles for obtaining licensing on the relevant rights and for making AI products and services available on the EU market compliant with those rules and rights, in a way similar to but dramatically increased to the digital non-AI era;

T. whereas case-law on the topic of the infringing use of copyrighted content for training AI models is still scarce, but several court decisions are expected in the near future, since judicial actions have been brought by various rights holders in the EU and other parts of the world against certain AI providers;