European Union: European Commission published first draft of General-Purpose AI Code of Practice, including copyright protection regulation

On 14 November 2024, the European Commission published the first draft of the General-Purpose Artificial Intelligence (AI) Code of Practice (Code). It delineates a copyright compliance framework under Article 53(1)(c) of the AI Act and Directive (EU) 2019/790, requiring providers of general-purpose AI models to put in place a policy to comply with Union law on copyright and related rights. The Code seeks to ensure providers respect copyright obligations, particularly when using protected content during the training or deployment of their models. The Code mandates upstream due diligence on training datasets, compliance with rights reservations using technologies including robots.txt, and measures to prevent copyright-infringing outputs in downstream applications. Providers must also ensure transparency by publishing crawler details, documenting data sources and authorisations, and designating complaint-handling contacts. These obligations apply across the model’s lifecycle, with oversight by the AI Office.