Copyright Compliance With the EU AI Act—Extraterritorial Traps for the Unwary

In an article published by Bloomberg Law, Prof. Paul Goldstein, Christiane Stuetzle and Susan Bischoff discuss the EU AI Act (AIA), a risk-based, product-safety approach, that was not originally intended to address copyright issues related to AI at all. However, the rapid emergence of publicly available generative AI applications prompted EU lawmakers to make some last-minute copyright-relevant additions with significant practical implications: providers of General-Purpose AI (GPAI) models will have to put in place a policy to comply with EU copyright law.

They note that, “The most striking aspect of the AIA's copyright-related provisions is that they will apply to GPAI model training activities wherever they are conducted, inside the EU and out—and even in countries whose domestic law specifically excuses these uses from copyright liability—if the resulting model is placed on the EU market. Although these provisions of the AIA are copyright-relevant, they will not be enforced through traditional copyright avenues of individual actions filed by authors and rights holders, but rather through measures taken by public authority, including fines and orders to withdraw AI models from the European market.”

Read the full article.