July was a particularly busy month until the last day. I'm glad I didn't plan big holidays, which would have been affected by the publication of the European Parliament's draft report, code of practice and transparency template! I will now be taking a break, and I am confident that my colleagues Annica and Luisiana will be able to take care of everything in my absence.
Beginning of July, the European Parliament published the draft report on Copyright and Generative AI. The report was prepared for the Legal Affairs Committee by MEP Axel Voss.
We welcome Mr Voss’s call for an immediate remuneration obligation on providers of AI models and systems and for full, actionable transparency and source documentation by providers and deployers of models and systems in respect of their use of protected works. However, while Mr Voss has often expressed disagreement with the Commission's interpretation of the text and data mining exception, I am disappointed that his proposals in this respect only consist in clarifying that the TDM exception applies to GenAI and follow the opt-out logic. As we have said before, we believe (and our members’ experience shows) that opt-out don’t trigger licensing and remuneration, so a central registry would only be a waste of time and money. Hopefully, Mr Voss is open to discuss with stakeholders, and he has already arranged a roundtable discussion on 1 September. Additionally, MEPs will have the chance to propose amendments to the report, allowing for necessary clarifications and further proposals to emerge.
On 10 July, the European Commission published the General-Purpose AI Code of Practice and on 24 July the Template for the public summary of training content for general-purpose AI models. The SAA participated in good faith in the drafting process of the code of practice, which took a lot of our time and energy, but the result is highly disappointing. Together with a group of 40 European and international organisations of authors, performers, producers and other rightholders, we formally expressed our dissatisfaction with the AI Act implementation measures (code of practice, guidelines and template). We strongly reject any claim that the Code of Practice strikes a fair and workable balance or that the Template will deliver “sufficient” transparency about the majority of copyright works or other subject matter used to train GenAI models. This is simply untrue and is a betrayal of the EU AI Act’s objectives. We call on the European Commission to revisit the implementation package and enforce Article 53 in a meaningful way, ensuring that the EU AI Act lives up to its promise to safeguard European intellectual property rights in the age of generative AI. We also call on the European Parliament and Member States, as co-legislators, to challenge the unsatisfactory process of this exercise, which will further weaken the situation of the creative and cultural sectors across Europe and do nothing to tackle ongoing violations of EU laws.
Before these documents were published, I had the opportunity to speak on the issue of copyright in the Age of GenAI at a side event of the WIPO Assemblies organised by the International Chamber of Commerce in Geneva. One of the points I made was to call for innovative licensing models to be developed. There are many possible options, including extended collective licensing, statutory remuneration rights or mandatory collective management. They all have one thing in common: they entrust collective management organisations as part of the solution to secure revenue streams for authors (You can find a few highlights on our LinkedIn page).
On 16 July, the Commission presented its proposal for the 2028-2034 EU budget. This includes a new integrated programme 'AgoraEU', which would merge the existing Creative Europe and Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) programmes into a single structure with three strands: Creative Europe - Culture, Media+, and Democracy, Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV+). The proposed budget allocation is €8.6 billion, which is more than double the current combined budget of Creative Europe and CERV. However, there is no information to determine how the money would be allocated.
Prior to the budget proposal, several MEPs sent a letter to the Commission urging them to preserve the Creative Europe programme, and warning that merging programmes could 'blur the line between culture and civic objectives, erasing the specificity of each’. As a part of a broad coalition with other organisations within the cultural and creative sectors we are following the development closely and will respond after the summer.
My team has been busy preparing our upcoming events and making sure that save-the-dates were sent out before the summer break.
On 7 October we will host our annual dinner with MEPs and European filmmakers in the European Parliament in Strasbourg in partnership with the LUX Audience Award, FERA and FSE. On 4 November, we will celebrate the SAA 15th anniversary with a public conference on ‘audiovisual authors’ rights in disruptive times’ in Brussels. Finally, on 18-19 November we will organise a regional seminar on audiovisual authors’ rights in Central and Eastern Europe in Skopje with our members AIPA (Slovenia) and ZAPA (Poland), in partnership with AZAS (North Macedonia). Find out more on our events page.
I will be on holiday until 18 August. I will rest by the seaside facing England in the French region called “Côte d’Opale”. It will be a new place for me, in my quest to escape any potential heatwave. When I am back, I am going for a couple of days to my very first Sarajevo Film Festival, which I am very excited about!
I wish you a relaxing and recharging summer break before the busy month of September begins.
Best regards,
