In a new open letter addressed to Henna Virkkunen, Vice-President of the European Commission and Commissioner responsible for tech sovereignty, security, and democracy, EuroFIA and 14 other creative content organizations have expressed strong concerns regarding both the drafting and consultation process of the AI Code of Practice, as well as its substance. The Code, currently being developed under the auspices of the AI Office, is intended to establish minimum requirements for GPAI providers, particularly in relation to their use of training data in compliance with the IP legal framework in the EU, including the right of content owners wishing to prevent their works from being exploited for such purposes.
The second draft of the Code remains heavily skewed in favor of the tech industry, which appears to have multiple official channels to influence the drafting process. Alarmingly, it even seems to grant tech companies preferential treatment by relaxing certain legal requirements outlined in existing EU regulations. For example, while Article 4 of Directive 790/2019 mandates that those relying on the text and data mining (TDM) exception must have legal access to training data, the current draft of the Code merely requires providers to make “reasonable and proportionate efforts” to ensure lawful access. Similarly, the Code only “encourages” consideration of European or national databases of known infringing websites, rather than mandating their use.
Additionally, the draft continues to give undue and unjustified preference to the Robots.txt protocol as the sole mandatory rights reservation mechanism for GPAI providers’ web crawlers, while compliance with any other mechanism is left largely at their discretion. EuroFIA and the other signatories also strongly oppose the proposal to grant small and medium-sized enterprises broad exemptions from compliance. We argue that the determining factor for tailored and proportional obligations should be the capacity of the AI model itself, rather than the size of the GPAI provider—while emphasizing that exemptions should not be granted in any case.
The AI Office has recently requested additional time to finalize the third draft of the Code. It is hoped that this extension signals a willingness to heed these concerns and revise the rules to genuinely protect content creators, rather than merely accommodating the minimal compliance standards that GPAI providers appear willing to accept.
