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🎬 Premiere: AI & Copyright Infringement

Emerging Challenges in AI Governance | Paid Subscriber Edition | #163

👋 Hi, Luiza Jarovsky here. Welcome to this newsletter's 163rd edition, read by 48,300+ subscribers in 160+ countries. Not a subscriber? Join us.

🌍 We are a leading AI governance publication helping to shape the future of AI policy, compliance, and regulation. It's great to have you here!

💎 This is a paid subscriber edition, where I explore emerging challenges in AI governance. It's a must-read for professionals in the field.


🎬 Premiere: AI & Copyright Infringement

Today is the official premiere of my much-anticipated talk with Andres Guadamuz (750+ people registered for the live event). Paid subscribers can enjoy the full 76-minute recording (above), and free subscribers can watch a 9-minute preview.

Andres is one of the world's most renowned experts in the field of Intellectual Property Law. He is an associate professor of Intellectual Property Law at the University of Sussex and editor-in-chief of the Journal of World Intellectual Property.

We discussed topics such as:

  • copyright concerns in the context of AI training and deployment;

  • the applicability of the fair use exception;

  • the possibility of receiving copyright protection when using AI to create art or literary works;

  • the various ongoing copyright lawsuits in the U.S.;

  • and more.

The intersection of AI and copyright will remain a trending topic in 2025, with more lawsuits expected worldwide (although at a slower pace; see my 2025 forecast here), an increase in licensing deals between media organizations and AI companies, and more regulatory and policy efforts to ensure copyright law is fit for the AI age.

Given these ongoing challenges, in today's newsletter, beyond the recording of my conversation with Andres, I want to share additional thoughts and essential resources on AI and copyright that will be helpful for AI governance professionals navigating the field. Make sure to bookmark this article and consult as new challenges emerge:

1️⃣ AI and Copyright at TechnoLlama

╰┈➤ In his blog TechnoLlama, active for over 20 years, Andres Guadamuz—my guest in this live talk—has been writing highly engaging articles on AI and copyright issues. Recent examples include:

  • Can a Dutch case about RSS teach us anything about AI copyright? - link

  • LAION wins copyright infringement lawsuit in German court - link

  • The politics of AI - link

  • Snoopy, Mario, Pikachu, and reproduction in generative AI - link

  • Chinese court declares that AI-generated image has copyright - link

  • and more.

Make sure to check them out.

2️⃣ AI and Copyright: EU Law

From an EU law perspective, copyright compliance will be a core pillar of AI governance strategies. The EU AI Act, for example, in its article 51.1(c), establishes that providers of general-purpose AI models must:

“put in place a policy to comply with Union law on copyright and related rights, and in particular to identify and comply with, including through state-of-the-art technologies, a reservation of rights expressed pursuant to Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790.”

However, even in the EU, the topic is not as straightforward as it seems.

Last year, a German court dismissed the AI copyright lawsuit filed by photographer Robert Kneschke against LAION (Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network) for using his images to train AI without his consent. You can read more about this case and its recent implications in my recent article.

Summarizing what happened: the Hamburg Regional Court dismissed the infringement allegations and decided that LAION's use of Robert Kneschke’s images to train AI fell into Section 60(d) of the German Copyright Law (implementing Article 3 of the EU Copyright Directive), which establishes an exception for text and data mining for the purposes of scientific research.

As the Court relied on Article 3, somewhat expanding it (and not Article 4 of the EU Copyright Directive), the reservation of rights provision was not applied, weakening creators’ rights and making it unclear the level of protection that other EU courts would afford to creators.

╰┈➤ To learn more about AI and Copyright in the EU context, check out these resources:

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