Copyright in the Artificial Intelligence Act – A Primer

The European Union’s AI Act as adopted by the European Parliament on 13 March 2024 contains two provisions of particular relevance for copyright. According to Art. 53(1)(c) and (d), providers of general-purpose AI models shall (1) put in place a policy to comply with Union copyright law, and in particular to identify and comply with, including through state of the art technologies, a reservation of rights expressed pursuant to Art. 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790, and (2) draw up and make publicly available a sufficiently detailed summary about the content used for training of the general-purpose AI model. This article summarizes the history of these provisions, explains that the EU legislature has merged two different types of laws, identifies the addressees of the copyright-related obligations, and gives an overview of their legal nature, content and enforcement.