European Parliament votes on artificial intelligence laws

OPPORTUNITY TO ENHANCE RULES AGAINST ILLEGAL USES OF MUSIC

The European Parliament today voted to approve its position on the EU’s incoming Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act. The EU’s AI Act will frame new rules on key issues such as what AI companies can and cannot do with copyright protected works such as the world’s music, as well as set transparency standards for Generative AI services.

The EU legislation comes as several other jurisdictions worldwide - such as the US, China and the UK - consider their own AI laws to address issues around Generative AI, copyright infringement and appropriation of artists’ work online.

As lead negotiators for the European Parliament, European Commission and Council (EU27) now move to finalise The AI Act during ‘trilogue’ talks, our industry calls for the remaining vital goals to be secured.

JOHN PHELAN – ICMP DIRECTOR GENERAL

“Much is new about AI, much is not. The music industry has utilised it for many years, in multiple modes, such as tailoring streamed music playlists to suit fans’ tastes, enhancing commercial scale search tools for vast repertoires, even deploying AI to counter unlicensed music uses by AI ‘bad actors’. Global market investment and CapEx (capital expenditure) in AI affecting our industry exceeded $120 billion in 2022.

However, what cannot, is not, and will not be tolerated anywhere is infringement of songwriters’ and composers’ rights. Our industry is already working to solve and prevent harms caused by companies who misuse AI to scrape the world’s music, use artists’ work without permission or flood digital services with machine generated works.

In today’s vote, the European Parliament has expressly agreed with our sector on several fronts. The EU’s incoming AI rules will ensure ‘special attention’ for intellectual property rights, establish AI labelling criteria and set transparency obligations on AI companies using music datasets for model training or product output. However, further improvements to these guardrails are there to be won. We call on the EU to be ambitious in the final talks and conclude a gold-standard law. We must enable AI to flourish, ensure more detailed reporting obligations, set suitable sanctions for breaches and recognise copyright as the fundamental catalyst for music creation, commerce and compensation.”