Last week, the District Court of Hamburg, Germany, held a hearing in the first European case to examine the legality of using copyrighted works for the purpose of training generative AI models. The case centers on LAION e.V.’s (a German non-profit organization that builds widely used training datasets) download of an image by German photographer…
Today marks the fifth anniversary of the entry into force of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. It is hard to remember how divisive and controversial the Directive was during its creation. The Directive’s most controversial provision – Article 17 – which brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets and…
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. This must have been the key insight at the Polish Culture and National Heritage Ministry when the new administration took over and discovered that more than 2.5 years after the implementation deadline, Poland still had to implement the provisions of the 2019 Copyright in the Digital Single Market…
On Friday evening, after 38 hours of negotiations, representatives of the European Parliament, EU member states and the European Commission reached a provisional agreement on the proposed AI Act. The deal reached on Friday night now paves the way for the adoption of the AI Act in the first half of 2024, bringing to an…
Machine readable opt-outs from TDM As we head into the last month of the current EU legislative term, there are increasing signs that EU lawmakers are unable to agree on the AI Act, which was supposed to be one of the crowning digital policy achievements of Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission. Recent media reports suggest…
As generative machine learning (ML) systems become more mainstream, the discussion about copyright and ML input is back in the spotlight. At the heart of this discussion is the question of whether authors, creators, and other rightholders need to give permission before their works can be used as input for generative ML systems that produce…
The judgement of the European Court of Justice in case C-401/19 has hardly laid to rest the debates over the use of upload filters in automated copyright enforcement. On the contrary, by declaring Article 17 of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market compatible with the Charter, while requiring Member States to ensure…
Article 17 is here to stay, but most national implementations fail to meet the fundamental rights standards developed by the Court in its judgment. Tuesday’s long-awaited ruling in Case C-401/19 finally brings some clarity to the almost three-year-long discussion about the implementation of Article 17 of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (DSM…
Last week the European Commission published its proposal for a Data Act. The proposal is the second major element of the European Data Strategy presented in 2020 and complements the Data Governance Act that is expected to be formally adopted this spring. As expected, the proposed Data Act introduces rules strengthening user access and portability…
At the beginning of 2021, half a year before the implementation deadline of the DSM directive, only a single EU member state (the Netherlands) had passed a full implementation of the DSM directive. By the date of the implementation deadline a mere three Member States had fully implemented the directive, and by the end of…
