French MPs Seek Changes on EU Copyright Rules for AI

French lawmakers believe the EU’s controversial Copyright Directive will have to be amended to cover generative AI.

A commission from the French National Assembly published an opinion last week that called for changes to be made to EU copyright law to encompass AI-generated content.

Mireille Clapot, the Member of Parliament leading on the opinion told Euractiv: “How to identify original works by artists? How to attribute works generated by AI intermediaries? How to remunerate authors whose works have been used? How to manage opt-outs for artists who refuse their content to be used by AI? These are the questions that require a review of the copyright directive in light of generative AI.”

The Copyright Directive came into force back in 2019. It was a sweeping piece of legislation designed to modernize protections for authors and publishers in the digital age. But at the time, OpenAI had yet to wow the world with ChatGPT – even the precursor model GPT-3 hadn’t been released at that time.

Since then, vast amounts of the web have been crawled to train AI models, with OpenAI being hit with a lawsuit by The New York Times over alleged infringement.

The EU AI Act is nearing becoming transposed into law and encompasses some aspects related to generative AI, including last-minute amendments to ensure platforms like ChatGPT adhere to ‘transparency requirements.’

Related:UPDATE: EU Reaches Deal on Historic AI Act

The EU AI Act contains just two provisions related to copyright, both relating to providers of general-purpose AI models including obligations to “respect Union copyright law” and another forcing general-purpose developers to make publicly available a summary of the content used to train their system.

However, French lawmakers want more, with the opinion published last week calling for an update to the Copyright Directive to “take into account AI generative implications intellectual and industrial properties.”

France was among the most supportive of EU member states when it came to the Copyright Directive, having raced to implement it into law.

Such support saw it tangle with Google over licensing deals with publishers and news agencies. Article 15 of the Directive forced aggregators like Google to pay press publishers for showing news snippets. Google was subsequently fined $510 million in July 2021 for failing to comply.