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

On 30 March 2025, the European Commission closes its consultation on the third draft of the General-Purpose Artificial Intelligence (AI) Code of Practice. The Copyright section, aligned with Article 53(1)(c) AI Act and Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790, establishes provider obligations to implement a copyright compliance policy. This includes prohibiting circumvention of technological protection measures, avoiding use of recognised piracy domains, and detecting machine-readable rights reservations such as those defined by the Robot Exclusion Protocol. Providers must use or support standardised metadata-based mechanisms to respect reservations during web-crawling and ensure that models do not repeatedly generate infringing content. For non-web-crawled data, providers must perform reasonable due diligence to determine whether rights reservations were respected. The section also mandates contact points and procedures to address rightsholder complaints.