Generative AI – Intellectual property cases and policy tracker

On 12 July 2024, the EU AI Act was published in the Official Journal of the EU.  The Act entered into force on 1 August 2024 and will be fully applicable 24 months after its entry into force, i.e., on 2 August 2026 (though certain provisions will be applicable sooner, and others at 36 months). There are staggered dates for when different parts of the Act will take effect (see our EU AI Act implementation tracker for more information) :

• 6 months after coming into force, provisions concerning banned AI practices take effect (i.e. 2 February 2025)
• 1 year after coming into force, provisions on penalties, confidentiality obligations and general-purpose AI take effect (i.e. 2 August 2025)
• 2 years after coming into force, the remaining provisions take effect (i.e. 2 August 2026)
• 3 years after coming into force, obligations for high-risk AI systems forming a product (or safety component of a product) regulated by EU product safety legislation apply (i.e. 2 August 2027)

In relation to copyright, the Act contains provisions relating to obligations on general-purpose AI systems around compliance with EU copyright law (including relating to text and data mining and opt-outs under the EU Digital Single Market Copyright Directive) and transparency around content used to train such models in the form of sufficiently detailed summaries. This form is now available and is mandatory for completion for GPAI models put on the market from 2 August 2025 (with grandfathering provisions in place).  We have written about the template, the information to be provided, and how useful this will be for rights holders here. There is also a requirement that certain AI-generated content (essentially 'deep fakes') be labelled as such.

The GPAI Code of Practice has now been finalised and awaits final approval. We have written about the Code of Practice here. In relation to copyright, the Code of Practice requires signatories to:

• Draw up, keep up-to-date and implement a copyright policy
• Reproduce and extract only lawfully accessible copyright-protected content when crawling the World Wide Web
• Identify and comply with rights reservations when crawling the World Wide Web
• Mitigate the risk of copyright-infringing outputs
• Designate a point of contact and enabling the lodging of complaints

Signatories will also be required to provide a general description of how the model was trained, including a breakdown of each training stage and key technical/design choices and assumptions, as well as how its training data was sourced.

The Code is voluntary and non-binding, and is intended to assist GPAI providers in compliance with the relevant provisions of the AI Act. It does not supersede or otherwise affect existing requirements to comply with other applicable laws, directives and regulatory frameworks, such as copyright. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others have already indicated that they will sign the Code, whereas Meta is the outlier stating that Europe is going down "the wrong path" on AI regulation.

The Commission has launched a call for tenders for a feasibility study on a central registry of opt-outs.