YOUR GO-TO INTELLIGENCE RESOURCE FOR THE SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING INDUSTRY

The European Commission has launched a stakeholder consultation to support implementation of the AI Act’s requirements on reserving rights from text and data mining by general-purpose AI providers.

The consultation has been launched to assist in implementing the AI Act obligation requiring providers of general-purpose AI models to identify and comply with reservations of rights expressed by rightsholders. The Copyright section of the General-Purpose AI (GPAI) Code of Practice provides a pathway for providers to demonstrate compliance with the requirement to establish policies aligned with European Union copyright rules.

The Commission has approved the GPAI Code of Practice as adequate for the purpose of AI Act compliance. The code includes commitments for signatories to identify and comply with appropriate machine-readable protocols used to express rights reservations, in addition to respecting robots.txt and subsequent versions of this standard developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

To support implementation of these obligations, the Commission has launched a process to facilitate identification and general agreement on opt-out protocols that can be considered state-of-the-art, technically implementable, and widely adopted by rightsholders across cultural and creative sectors, as specified in Measure 1.3 of the Copyright section of the code. This process will be organized with support from the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and will involve close engagement with relevant stakeholder groups.

The consultation first invites rightsholders, general-purpose AI providers, civil society organizations, standardization bodies, and other interested parties to share views on the technical feasibility and adoption of different Text and Data Mining opt-out solutions identified in an EU Intellectual Property Office study development of generative artificial intelligence from a copyright perspective.

Stakeholders are also invited to express interest in participating in follow-up workshops that will address opt-out protocols that Code signatories and other providers must respect under the AI Act. The Commission will facilitate exchanges among stakeholder groups with the aim of reaching general agreement on a list of such protocols, and signatories to the General-Purpose AI Code of Practice will be invited to these meetings by default.

Following the discussions, the Commission will publish a list of generally agreed machine-readable opt-out solutions. This list will be reviewed regularly, at least every two years, in line with updates to the Code of Practice.

An online information session for interested stakeholders is scheduled for 09 December 2025 to provide further details on the purpose, structure, and expected outcomes of the process. During the session, the technical opt-out solutions identified in the EU Intellectual Property Office study will be presented.