News Media Europe and a coalition of 15 other European rightsholder organisations have today sent a letter to Vice President Virkkunen to express serious concerns about the second draft of the General-purpose AI Code of Practice (CoP) under the EU AI Act, which is moving away from meeting the objectives for which it is foreseen by the Act.
The draft CoP is generally unclear and risks presenting a diluted version of the EU’s AI Act that contradicts copyright law. Instead, the CoP should foster a licensing market of European works for AI services. In addition, the CoP should be urgently reviewed to avoid its restrictive and selective interpretation of Copyright rules on rights reservations for text-and-data mining.
The draft also dilutes existing legal obligations by introducing loose commitments based on means (“reasonable steps”, “proportionate”, “best efforts”). Interpreting these principles is for courts of law, not for the CoP which instead should lay down clear principles for compliance, such as observing lawful access.
As a result, the CoP risks creating backdoor legislation and rightsholders are still unable to verify if and how their works are used by GPAIs. Considering the draft transparency template of the AI Office, the draft measures remain largely insufficient and even counterproductive to fulfil their stated purpose, as defined in the relevant articles and recitals of the AI Act.