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

On 19 December 2024, the European Commission published the second draft of the General-Purpose Artificial Intelligence (AI) Code of Practice (the Code), which establishes Copyright protection regulation obligations. The Code aligns with Article 53(1)(c) of the AI Act, requiring providers of general-purpose AI models to implement a policy that ensures compliance with Union copyright and related rights law. The Code applies to providers of general-purpose AI models, including large generative models, and requires them to adopt a copyright compliance policy covering all development stages. Key obligations include maintaining and publishing internal copyright policies, assessing third-party datasets for copyright compliance and ensuring lawful access for text and data mining. It also focuses on avoiding the use of piracy websites, respecting robots.txt protocols, and identifying machine-readable rights reservations. Providers must also disclose their rights compliance measures publicly, prevent copyright-related overfitting, prohibit infringing uses in user terms, and designate a point of contact for rightsholders.