JURI COMMITTEE: REINVENTING COPYRIGHT IN THE ERA OF GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

In the heart of a summer buzzing with algorithms, the European Parliament's JURI committee met on July 15 to discuss the report by MEP Axel Voss on "Copyright and Generative Artificial Intelligence." Behind the apparent technicality lies a decisive battle: ensuring the survival of a European cultural ecosystem while unleashing the potential of a technology as disruptive as the printing press in its time. The debate, sometimes heated, revealed the formidable tension between the protection of creators, the demand for innovation, and the imperative of digital sovereignty.

AXEL VOSS: THE URGENCY OF A PERMANENT FRAMEWORK

The German rapporteur sets the line: action must be taken faster than language models reinvent themselves. Refusing the idea of copyright frozen in analog amber, he promotes a legal infrastructure comparable to the General Data Protection Regulation: stable, legible, global in its influence. His ambition is coupled with concrete tools: an automated license market so that each training line is authorized, an inviolable digital marking to identify the origin of works, a centralized register entrusted to the EUIPO where developers and verifiers would cross-reference metadata and rights. In the meantime, he envisions a transitional compensation fee to prevent the hemorrhage of value towards extra-European giants, convinced that unremunerated European creation equates to exiled intellectual capital.

SHADOW RAPPORTEURS: NUANCES AND BOUNDARIES OF CONSENSUS

On the social-democrat benches, Tiemo Wölken shares the spirit of conquest but warns of the disproportion between entertainment majors and independents. According to him, without a regulatory net, a totally liberalized market would turn into a duopoly. He therefore calls for a collective negotiation architecture that avoids sacrificing the individual author in the great bazaar of licenses.

The Dutchman Ton Diepeveen carries the voice of reformist conservatives: priority to the simplicity and speed of compensation, skepticism about any mechanism deemed bureaucratic. He rejects the idea of a mandatory register, considering it costly and redundant; for him, the burden must rest solely on AI designers, who, armed with audit tools, must prove their respect for the law.

From Renew, Laurence Farreng urges the hemicycle to immediately plug the gap created by the text and data mining exception. She defends an inversion of the burden of proof: developers must demonstrate that they have not ingested protected works; creators must be able to effectively oppose through end-to-end traceability. She declares herself open to a dynamic distribution tax, provided it does not freeze negotiation and does not institute either a global license or a single price.

As for the Greens/EFA group, David Cormand denounces the "colonial extraction" of European culture by non-European platforms. He calls for a presumption of use: if AI is unable to prove its innocence, the remuneration of rights holders becomes automatic. In his eyes, absolute transparency is not a luxury but the foundation of cultural democracy.

THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION: BETWEEN IMPACT STUDY AND VETERAN FIRE

Giuseppe Abbamonte, for DG CNECT, supports the approach but recalls that legislation must be based on rigorous impact studies. Brussels has already launched, in February 2025, a feasibility study on an opt-out register and, in June, a call for tenders to revise the DSM directive: proof that the machine is in motion, even if the gap widens between political speed and technological acceleration. He announces a standardized model for summarizing training data, intended to lift the veil on the corpora feeding AIs, and assures that the code of conduct for general-purpose AI systems will soon be tightened, particularly on the obligation to respect exclusion signals.

TRANSPARENCY: CORNERSTONE OR UNFINISHED PROJECT

All agree on one point: without transparency, opt-out remains a dead letter. However, practical implementation raises three dilemmas. First, granularity: should a musical work cited in a mash-up be signaled in the same way as a fully digitized novel? Then, standardization: the Robots.txt protocol, which has become by default an exclusion tool, offers neither legal robustness nor traceability. Finally, supervision: entrusting control to the EUIPO guarantees the uniqueness of the counter but increases the fear of an administrative mammoth.

ECONOMIC MODELS: BETWEEN TAX, LICENSE, AND AUTOMATED MARKET

Proposals oscillate between a levy inspired by private copying, a mandatory license proportional to the volume of ingested works, and an algorithmic market where each download would trigger an automatic micro-payment via sovereign blockchain. Supporters of the fee believe it would ensure a stable windfall for creators; its detractors fear a windfall effect for the behemoths and a stifling of innovation. In any case, Europe seems determined to break with the ideology of free data, considering that the cultural raw material deserves the same respect as the critical metals of the energy transition.

ARTICLES 4 AND 17 OF THE DSM DIRECTIVE: RESOLVING THE ANACHRONISM

Article 4, which frames text and data mining, was designed as a lever for scientific research; it is discovered as a pivot of a generative content industry it had not anticipated. Parliamentarians therefore envisage moving from a general exception to a two-stage regime: non-commercial use exempted, commercial exploitation subject to license or fair remuneration. As for Article 17, dedicated to online sharing, it could serve as a matrix to hold generative platforms accountable: what applies to music streaming must apply to model training.

GLOBAL DIMENSION: COMPETITION, SOVEREIGNTY, AND RULES OF THE GAME

Beyond the Old Continent, the battle is already global. The United States is testing extended fair use clauses, Japan is experimenting with a voluntary opt-out regime, China is deploying an algorithmic legal deposit system coupled with censorship. If Europe does not quickly establish its standards, it risks importing economic models that ignore fair remuneration or being imposed extraterritorial exceptions. The strategic dimension is clear: creative sovereignty is not incidental but an integral part of European power, as vital as energy or defense.

PARLIAMENTARY TIMELINE AND 2026 PERSPECTIVE

Amendments must be submitted by September 12; the committee vote is scheduled for November, then the plenary in December. If the text fails, the complete revision of the DSM directive, planned for 2026, would become the new horizon, extending uncertainty. Conversely, a broad agreement would give the Commission a solid political mandate to negotiate with the OECD, WIPO, and commercial partners, establishing Europe as a leader in global governance of machine-generated content.

CONCLUSION

In the silent din of servers, human creation risks dissolving into faceless data if the law is slow to protect it. Yet creativity is not a luxury; it is the breath of civilization, the memory of peoples, and the promise of the future. By making transparency the compass, fair remuneration the pivot, and legislative speed the requirement, the JURI committee strives to chart a path between sterile repression and blind permissiveness. It remains to transform speeches into articles, articles into applicable rules, and rules into shared trust. Europe once knew how to forge a single market; it must now invent a digital humanism where the machine serves culture without vampirizing it. The destiny of copyright in the 21st century is at stake here: it must be both a bulwark, a compass, and an engine, so that the revolution of artificial intelligence enriches, rather than erases, the creativity of authors and the diversity of European voices.

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