Changes from report parliamentary committee draft to plenary report

Added9. Calls on the Commission to facilitate, through consultation with collective management societies, the establishment of voluntary collective licensing agreements per sector, where appropriate, as a means to quickly establish a working licensing market that provides a balanced and efficient framework ensuring the fair remuneration of rights holders while enabling AI providers to access high-quality training data; urges the Commission to ensure that such collective licensing agreements are accessible to all stakeholders, including individual creators and SMEs, promoting good faith negotiations and transparency; recalls that rights holders’ refusal to have their content used for training purposes must be respected;

Added10. Calls on the Commission to provide legal certainty for both rights holders and AI providers and to assess the necessity and feasibility of tools enabling rights holders to effectively exclude the use of their works from AI training in a limited number of machine-readable standardised formats managed by a trusted intermediary; proposes making the EUIPO the trusted intermediary that manages and lists the exclusions and can refer to other catalogues of exclusions already in existence; stresses that participation in any new mechanism should be simple and cost-efficient and should not invalidate or override previously expressed refusals, while providing AI providers with a comprehensive tool to ensure copyright compliance; believes that the creation of such mechanisms should be designed and assessed in consultation with the affected stakeholders, in particular rights holders, AI providers and their respective representative organisations;

Added11. Recommends that the Commission also assign to EUIPO responsibility for supporting a sector-based, voluntary licensing process, so as to streamline relations between GenAI providers and rights holders, establishing a workable, innovation-friendly framework that supports the EU’s competitiveness and does not unduly hinder the development of AI technologies, without entailing disproportionate administrative burdens or posing a risk to the enforceability of exclusive rights;

Added12. Calls on the Commission to propose the transparency and source documentation on the use of copyright-protected work or other protected subject matter to providers and deployers of general-purpose AI models and systems, placed accessing on the market in the EU, including for opt-out compliance to a trusted intermediary, such as the EUIPO; recommends that the Commission continue working with AI providers and relevant stakeholders to improve the template for training data; considers that for purposes such as inferencing and retrieval-augmented generation, which require continuous and real-time crawling, transparency should be complemented by an obligation for crawlers to be identifiable to the web operator and for AI companies to maintain detailed records of any crawling activities carried out, taking into due account the need to protect trade secrets and confidential business information and ensuring an appropriate balance between such protection and the effective implementation of transparency obligations; emphasises that digital watermarking, which involves discreetly inserting a signature, code, or specific information directly into protected content – text, image, video or audio – is an innovative and robust tool for protecting copyright and related rights; emphasises that the Commission must also foster research and the development of standards for innovative technological solutions that enhance the ability to verify data-set information, including cryptographic watermarks; considers that any new opt-out mechanism should not invalidate any opt-outs previously expressed;

Added13. Considers that no legal framework governing the training of GenAI on works and other objects protected by copyright and related rights should be put in place without establishing full transparency regarding the use of such data and the effective protection and enforcement of the rights of creators, which would restore the absolute right of creators to ensure their full bargaining power with a view to obtaining appropriate and proportionate remuneration;

Added14. Stresses that the General-Purpose AI Code of Practice, guidelines and templates should be revised and treated as living documents requiring regular updates to address emerging challenges in copyright protection and AI development; notes that this Code of Practice is a temporary tool for demonstrating compliance with the AI Act until harmonised standards are developed, as underlined in the guidelines published by the European AI Office on 18 July 2025; welcomes the direction of travel in the General-Purpose Code of Practice’s copyright chapter, including commitments on dataset documentation, opt-outs and complaint handling, while noting remaining shortcomings; calls on the European AI Office to enforce these provisions robustly and facilitate the work towards achieving the EU’s highest standards for efficient compliance with the requirements in question, and urges signatories to adopt a public copyright policy and operate an accessible, time-bound complaint mechanism that provides effective redress for rights holders;

Added15. Recommends that the Commission, independently of and before starting its planned review of the copyright framework and the CDSM Directive and without presupposing the need for legislative revision, urgently conduct a thorough assessment to find a rapid solution of whether the implementation of the existing EU copyright acquis adequately addresses the legal uncertainty and competitive effects associated with the use of protected works and other subject matter for the training of GenAI systems, territoriality implications, the sustainability of other publicly available resources such as online encyclopaedias, libraries and archives, as well as the dissemination of AI-generated content that may substitute human-created expression; stresses that this assessment should be undertaken using a holistic approach, considering the needs of all stakeholders, including researchers, universities, libraries, cultural organisations, European AI-developers, including start-ups, news outlets and the creative sector, in relation to the use and development of AI;

Added16. Affirms that, in accordance with EU and international law and with a view to ensuring a level playing field between EU- and non-EU-based GenAI services, guaranteeing appropriate protection and fair remuneration for creators for the use of their works, enhancing the licensing of such works, and ultimately promoting the cultural vitality of the EU, the principle of territoriality should be construed in such a way that, when generative AI models and systems are placed or made available on the EU market, EU copyright law, as recalled in recital 106 of the AI Act, applies regardless of the jurisdiction in which the copyright-relevant acts underpinning the training of those GenAI models and systems take place, with the consequence that, where copyright is not observed, those models and systems are barred from being placed or made available on the EU market;

Added17. Furthermore recommends that such an assessment be aimed at upholding a framework in which transparency is ensured regarding the use of copyright-protected work or other protected subject matter and in which fair and proportionate remuneration mechanisms for such use enable the generation of the resources needed for European artistic and creative production to thrive in the context of an AI-driven global transformation and for the sustainability of the public information ecosystem; stresses the urgency of ensuring these conditions in order to avoid the growing risk of human creativity gradually disappearing in favour of content generated by AI systems;

Added18. Notes the use of GenAI systems that rely massively on protected content, reproducing it without authorisation from, or compensation for, the rights holders affected by such use, particularly when integrated into search engines or other digital services that enable the generation, often in real time and at marginal cost, of content that infringes upon original works and other protected subject matter on which the models were trained, or that was scraped, including in real time, by such models; is alarmed that these practices may result in the provision of products and services that directly and unfairly compete with those of the rights holders, including through illegal self-preferencing of gatekeepers.

Added19. Recalls that voluntary licensing, whether individual or collective, underpins the success of the creative sectors by ensuring the flexibility to choose the most suitable model for each use, while stressing that rights holders must remain free to determine whether to license their works to generative AI systems and to set the corresponding remuneration, so as to safeguard sectoral diversity and prevent market distortions that could undermine the viability of the creative industries and the European press;

Added20. Calls for the establishment of a coherent and functioning licensing framework in respect of the use of content protected by copyright or related rights, to enable the fair remuneration of creators for the exploitation of their copyright-protected content by GenAI models; encourages providers of AI models to seek licences from rights holders and stresses that effective and comprehensive transparency regarding copyright-protected works and content used to train AI models is an essential prerequisite for the development of such a market; recommends, in this regard, strengthening enforcement and transparency obligations for AI developers using such content;

Added21. Calls on the Commission to examine whether there is a possible solution for the immediate, fair and proportionate remuneration for past uses of copyright-protected works by providers of general-purpose AI models and systems in respect of the use of content protected by copyright or related rights where a licensing market could not yet be established, with such an obligation applying until the reforms envisaged in this report are enhanced; opposes, in this regard, any proposal for a framework based on AI providers obtaining a global licence for training their GenAI models in exchange for a flat-rate payment; considers that the value of content protected by copyright or related rights must be proportionate and determined based on relevant factors, through negotiations in good faith between rights holders or their representatives and AI providers;

Added22. Encourages the Commission and the EUIPO to coordinate efforts towards raising awareness about copyright among AI developers and providers, which may include compliance checklists, legal and technological toolkits and technical guides, as well as to create awareness among copyright holders by providing useful and reliable information on copyright;

Added23. Welcomes the establishment of the EUIPO Copyright Knowledge Centre, as this will play a vital role in guiding the use of copyright in the age of GenAI by raising awareness, promoting legal clarity and fostering a balanced framework that supports creativity, innovation, cultural preservation and European competitiveness;

Added24. Calls on the Commission to propose the establishment of a rebuttable presumption that, for any generative AI model or system placed on the EU market, works and other subject matter protected by copyright or related rights have been used for the purposes of training, inferencing or retrieval augmented generation, where the transparency obligations set out in this resolution have not been fully complied with; recommends, furthermore, where a rights holder or the organisation representing them succeeds in legal proceedings either on the basis of this presumption or through submitted evidence, that any reasonable and proportionate legal costs and other expenses incurred in enforcing such rights be borne by the provider of the AI model or system, as applicable;

Added25. Insists that content fully generated by AI that does not meet the established criteria for copyright protection should remain ineligible for copyright protection, and that the public domain status of such outputs be clearly determined;

Added26. Urges the Commission to explore measures to counter the infringement of the rights of reproduction, of making available to the public and of communication to the public through the production of GenAI outputs, provided that such measures do not result in the prevention of the production of GenAI outputs that include works or other subject matter that do not infringe copyright and related rights, including for private use, quotation, criticism, review, caricature, parody and pastiche, and incidental inclusion;

Added27. Calls on the Commission to investigate measures to protect individuals against the dissemination of manipulated and AI-generated digital image, audio or video content, including artists’ works and performances, imitating their personal characteristics (deep fakes) without consent; highlights that digital service providers must have a clear obligation to act against this illegal use of an individual’s right to their own body, facial features and voice and intellectual property rights;

Added28. Stresses the need to clearly label purely AI-generated content in order to monitor the implementation of the transparency obligations by platforms offering creative content in order to detect and signal the existence of AI-generated content to their users; calls on the Commission to issue an EU code of practice on content labelling by the Commission without delay;

29. Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the Council, the Commission, and the governments and parliaments of the Member States.