On 2 June, FIA was invited to speak at a high-level conference on Authors’ Rights, Music Streaming and Artificial Intelligence, organised by the European Composers and Songwriters Alliance (ECSA) in Brussels. The event brought together European Commission Vice-President Henna Virkkunen and MEPs Axel Voss, Emma Rafowicz and Hélder Souza Silva.
Dominick Luquer, FIA’s General Secretary, highlighted the growing threat to audiovisual performers – particularly those doing audio work, background artists and performers in advertising – whose image, voice and likeness are being used without consent or compensation to train generative AI, threatening to displace jobs and, especially with deepfakes, causing serious reputational and economic harm. He stressed how these threats were hitting an already precarious workforce, struggling with atypical contracts, multiple job-holding and barriers to collective representation – and that the consequences extended well beyond performers themselves, with long-term implications for the creative industry, diverse cultures and democratic discourse.
On EU policy, Dominick was critical of regulatory decisions made under pressure from the tech industry: the extension of TDM exceptions to generative AI training, the failure to address years of unlawful mass ingestion predating the Copyright Directive, opt-out mechanisms placing an impossible burden on rights holders, and grey zones enabling abusive buyout practices to continue unchecked. He also raised serious concerns about a proposed rollback of fundamental digital rights and freedoms, and the Commission’s eagerness to grant companies a “legitimate interest” to process personal data for AI training.
Dominick called on the Commission to empower performers to control the use of their work to train generative AI. He pushed for clarity in the DSM Directive revision on lump sums versus buyouts – which routinely require performers to sign away all rights, in perpetuity, for any use across the entire universe – and argued these practices amount to an abuse of dominant position that must be regulated. He further called for reversing the burden of proof on AI training data, harmonised EU-wide protections for performers’ image, voice and likeness, and making public funding conditional on content being produced without replacing human creators.
