European Union: European Commission opened consultation on third draft of General-Purpose Artificial Intelligence Code of Practice including copyright regulations

On 11 March 2025, the European Commission published the third draft of the General-Purpose Artificial Intelligence (AI) Code of Practice and opened a consultation until 30 March 2025. The Copyright section outlines provider commitments under Article 53(1)(c) AI Act and Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790. Providers must draw up and implement a copyright policy to ensure lawful use of protected content during model training. Obligations include avoiding circumvention of technical protections such as paywalls, excluding recognised piracy domains, and identifying machine-readable rights reservations using the Robot Exclusion Protocol and other metadata-based standards. For non-web-crawled content, providers must undertake reasonable due diligence to verify compliance with rights reservation conditions. Additionally, measures are required to prevent repeated generation of infringing content and to facilitate rights-holder complaints through designated contact points.