The British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies (BAPLA) stands with authors, performers, and rightsholders across the EU’s cultural and creative sectors in opposing the third draft of the EU AI Act’s GPAI Code of Practice. The current draft fundamentally weakens the protections that the AI Act was designed to ensure, which will in turn create legal uncertainty and reduce AI developers’ obligations to uphold copyright law.
The current third draft eliminates key safeguards, from the removal of meaningful due diligence for third-party datasets to the downgrading of copyright opt-out mechanisms. By giving preferential status to robots.txt while making metadata-based opt-outs unenforceable, the draft fails to provide rightsholders with the effective tools necessary to control how their works are used. The removal of transparency obligations leaves AI companies unaccountable for compliance. This will undermine the legal framework that safeguards Europe’s creative industries.
Without substantial revision, this flawed Code will likely legitimise copyright infringement rather than preventing it. BAPLA lends its support to the call for a robust framework that will properly uphold copyright law, as well as ensuring meaningful enforcement and protecting the integrity of Europe’s cultural and media sectors.
See CEPIC Statement
See CEPIC (Joint position of 40 organisations representing the creative and press industries)