CEPIC proposes targeted amendments to strengthen the report, enhance its clarity, and ensure that its provisions are more closely aligned with the reality faced by visual content creators and producers, as well as being legally feasible.
The underlying ideas of these amendments are as follows:
- Our members want to be remunerated for the use of their content by GenAI providers. More fundamentally, however, they want to control their works, i.e. to authorise or prohibit use, or to license or opt out of AI. A mere remuneration scheme is insufficient to address the aforementioned 'systemic imbalance'.
- In order to enable licensing, strong and workable opt-out mechanisms are necessary. While an opt-out registry under the supervision of the EU IPO may be 'good to have', it does not represent a strong opt-out mechanism and will not work for visual rights holders. We surveyed our members and found that 90% said they would use the registry 'in addition to tools already in use to express opt-out', and that the only workable opt-out tool for 90% of them is the 'Terms & Conditions' on their websites, which AI scrapers should be trained to read. This form of opting out is expressly mentioned in Recital 18 of the CDSM Directive and must be respected by GenAI crawlers.
- In order to enable licensing, commercial freedom is key. A compulsory payment would stifle the emerging licensing market. While well-meaning, in effect it would devalue culturally important content by treating premium and low-value content as one and the same. This would benefit GenAI providers, who do not value cultural or media content or authorship.
- What we need is what the AI Act implementation documents (the Guidelines, the Code of Practice and the Template) have failed to provide: robust transparency obligations for GenAI providers. We agree with the rapporteur that transparency needs to be strengthened. We need Transparency to opt-out successfully, we need transparency to distribute any remuneration, we need transparency to settle any dispute that arises. we need is the correct implementation of the existing copyright framework and of the AI act.
- Lacking strong transparency, we support the idea of having an irrebuttable presumption.
Getty Images is a member of CEPIC and that CEPIC are aligned with their propositions. As a member of Creativity Works! we contributed and support their amendments. CEPIC’s reply seeks to avoid pitfalls such as new exceptions or over-reliance on remuneration schemes, and it ties every position back to contractual freedom, transparency, and enforcement that are vital for SMEs and micro-enterprises.
