MEP Axel VOSS is organising a stakeholder roundtable to discuss his own initiative report on AI & Copyright, to gather stakeholders' thoughts and get their input. The roundtable will take place on on September 1st from 11:00-13:00. The roundtable will be online only.
Sylvie FODOR is representing CEPIC at he meeting. The following statement has been prepared for the meeting.
"My name is Sylvie Fodor and I represent CEPIC – International Association of Visual content media licensing – Visual content matters. Our members are Photo and Video Libraries and Agencies, who themselves represent hundreds of thousands of visual content creators whose core business is the direct licensing of visual content offline and online. A steadily growing part of our members license visual “data” to GenAI providers or they license AI generated works themselves. Contributors are remunerated for this.
I would like to thank Mr Axel Voss for his interest in copyright and AI, and for his Own Initiative Report, which will help shape the debate. We agree with the outgoing prognostic that the lack of remuneration to rights holders in the "present copyright eco-system creates a "systemic imbalance” ... to their detriment, thereby undermining the economic sustainability of the creative sector within the European Union”.
We will file amendments to the Reportby 12 September. These amendments will go in the following direction:
- Ourmembers do want to be remunerated for the use of their content by GenAI providers(100 % of them), but more fundamentally, they want to be able to control theirworks – to authorize or to prohibit, in other words to LICENSE or to OPT-OUT ofAI. A mere remuneration scheme is not sufficient to fix the afore mentioned“systemic imbalance”.
- Inorder 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 tohave”, it does not represent a strong opt-out mechanism and will not work formost rights holders. We surveyed our membership and we found that 88% did saythey would use the Registry “in addition to tools already in use to expressopt-out” but that for 90% of them the only workable opt-out tool mechanism isthe “Terms & Conditions” on their websites, that AI scrapers should betrained to read. This form of opting-out is expressly mentioned in Recital 18of the CDSM Directive and should imperatively be respected by GenAI crawlers!
- In order to enable Licensing commercial freedom is key. A compulsory payment would stifle the emerging Licensing market. It is well-meant proposition but in effect it would devalue culturally important content, putting Premium content and low value content at one same level. This would play in the hands of Gen AI providers who do not value cultural content, 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 reach: strong transparency obligations on GenAI providers. We agree with the Rapporteur that Transparency needs to be strengthened and enforced. WE need Transparency to opt-out successfully, we need transparency to distribute any remuneration, we need transparency to settle any dispute that arises.
Therefore what we call for is the correct implementation of the existing copyright framework and of the AI act.
Thank you for your interest. "