On February 25, 2026, the European Parliament's Committee on Legal Affairs adopted, on its own initiative, a report addressing the intersection of generative artificial intelligence and copyright law. The Report sets forth the Parliament's position on safeguarding creators' rights while promoting European AI development. 

Background 

The report was prompted by the recognition that the rapid advancement of generative AI has created significant legal uncertainty around the use of copyright-protected content for AI training, as well as concerns about fair remuneration for creators. The report also acknowledges that uncertainties with respect to the legal applicability of certain laws to Generative AI ("GenAI") has led to underdevelopment and underdeployment within the EU. The European legislators acknowledged that current copyright law is insufficient to address the challenge of licensing copyrighted material for GenAI and that the lengthy procedures and lack of decisive action have left the EU and its actors at a disadvantage. The report aims to strike a fair balance between the interests of all stakeholders by proposing a combination of legal, technical, and technological solutions. 

The Parliament expressed concern that Europe faces a strategic challenge of lagging behind international developments in AI. At the same time, it emphasized that the creative and cultural sector represents approximately 4% of EU value and 6.9% of the EU's gross domestic product, employing around 8 million people. Accordingly, the report seeks to promote the advancement of GenAI technologies while safeguarding Europe's cultural sovereignty and ensuring fair remuneration for creators. 

Key Acknowledgements

The report makes several significant acknowledgements regarding the current state of GenAI and copyright:

Applicability of Copyright Law: The Parliament acknowledges evidence of widespread violation of copyright rights by GenAI providers, including unauthorized collection of works from the Internet, non-compliance with rights holders' opt-out reservations, use of pirated sources to obtain works, and failure to seek licenses where necessary. The report characterizes this pattern as a clear violation of creators' fundamental rights and a misappropriation of value detrimental to the EU's cultural and information sector. At the same time though, the report also acknowledges that current law is inadequate to address the challenges related to licensing copyrighted materials for GenAI uses specifically, including ambiguities in application of the Digital Singe Market Act (Directive 2019/0790) and Amending Directives 96/9/EC and 2001/29/EC (collectively, the “CDSM Directive”) for GenAI training.

Impracticality of Opt-Out Mechanisms: The report notes that systems for the reservation of rights ("opt out") to copyright-protected content are often impractical, may not cover all relevant acts of text and data mining, and lack the necessary transparency for effective implementation and enforcement. 

Existential Risk to European Society: The report warns that the risk of a gradual disappearance of the human dimension of creation in favor of AI-generated content poses an existential risk to European society and democracy by blurring the boundaries between truth and falsehood. 

Calls to Action by the Parliament

The report sets forth numerous specific calls to action directed at the European Commission and other stakeholders:

Licensing and Remuneration

The Parliament calls on the Commission to propose an additional legal framework to clarify licensing rules for GenAI and to address potential infringements of current copyright law, including provisions ensuring the effective cooperation of GenAI providers with creators and rights holders. This would be supplemental to (and potentially in some ways a replacement of) current copyright schemes. 

The Parliament urges the establishment of voluntary collective licensing agreements per sector as a means to quickly establish a working licensing market that provides fair remuneration for rights holders while enabling AI providers to access high-quality training data. Additionally, the Parliament calls on the Commission to examine whether there is a possible solution for immediate, fair, and proportionate remuneration for past uses of copyright-protected works by providers of general-purpose AI models. 

Transparency Obligations

The Parliament calls on the Commission to propose transparency and source documentation requirements for providers and deployers of general-purpose AI models and systems placed on the EU market, including for opt-out compliance to a trusted intermediary such as the EUIPO. The Parliament considers that full transparency regarding the use of copyright-protected works must consist of an itemized list identifying each item of copyright-protected content used for training. For purposes such as inferencing and retrieval-augmented generation, transparency should include an obligation for crawlers to be identifiable and for AI companies to maintain detailed records of crawling activities. 

Opt-Out Mechanism and EUIPO Role

The Parliament calls on the Commission to assess the necessity and feasibility of tools enabling rights holders to effectively exclude the use of their works from AI training in a limited number of machine-readable standardized formats. The report proposes making the EUIPO the trusted intermediary that manages and lists the exclusions and recommends assigning to EUIPO responsibility for supporting a sector-based, voluntary licensing process. The Parliament welcomes the establishment of the EUIPO Copyright Knowledge Centre as playing a vital role in guiding the use of copyright in the age of GenAI. Though the proposed mechanism is not spelled out, it suggests a significant structured opt-out system, which all GenAI developers would need to implement and comply with in order to properly exclude the identified copyrighted materials. This may also significantly incentive copyright registration within the EU - as a tool to protect against GenAI training, if the Commission adopts a rule tying copyright registration to the ability to opt-out.

Rebuttable Presumption of Use

The Parliament also recommends establishment of a rebuttable presumption that, for any generative AI model or system placed on the EU market, works protected by copyright have been used for training, inferencing, or retrieval-augmented generation where transparency obligations have not been fully complied with. Where a rights holder succeeds in legal proceedings based on this presumption or through submitted evidence, reasonable and proportionate legal costs should be borne by the AI provider. This would drastically impact the incentives for complying with transparency obligations. Given the black box nature of many GenAI systems, it may not be straightforward to rebut such a presumption since companies may not be able to specifically show which materials were or were not used in generating a particular output. As such, meeting transparency obligations, as under this proposal, would have downstream effects on not only possible infringement, but damages as well. 

Protection of Press and Media

The Parliament urges the Commission to explore the possibility to safeguard the press and news media sector, whose services are repeatedly exploited by AI systems, and to assess mechanisms ensuring that providers of GenAI that divert traffic and revenue from press outlets compensate such outlets in a fair, proportionate, and non-discriminatory manner. The Parliament suggests the Commission explore how ancillary rights for press publishers, journalists, and news editors could be extended to cover purposes beyond AI training, such as inferencing and retrieval-augmented generation. 

AI-Generated Content and Deepfakes

The Parliament insists that content fully generated by AI that does not meet the established criteria for copyright protection should remain ineligible for copyright protection, and the public domain status of such outputs should be clearly determined - which would be consistent with similar findings in the United States. The Parliament also calls on the Commission to investigate measures to protect individuals against the dissemination of manipulated and AI-generated digital content, including deepfakes, imitating their personal characteristics without consent. 

Enforcement and Territorial Application

The Parliament affirms that the principle of territoriality should be construed such that when generative AI models and systems are placed or made available on the EU market, EU copyright law applies regardless of the jurisdiction in which the copyright-relevant acts underpinning training take place. Where copyright is not observed, those models and systems should be barred from being placed or made available on the EU market. 

Next Steps

The Parliament has instructed its President to forward the resolution to the Council, the Commission, and the governments and parliaments of the Member States. The report recommends that the Commission, independently of and before starting its planned review of the copyright framework and the CDSM Directive, urgently conduct a thorough assessment to find a rapid solution regarding whether the implementation of the existing EU copyright acquis adequately addresses the legal uncertainty and competitive effects associated with the use of protected works for GenAI training. 

The Parliament stresses that the General-Purpose AI Code of Practice, guidelines, and templates should be revised and treated as living documents requiring regular updates to address emerging challenges in copyright protection and AI development. The Parliament calls on the European AI Office to enforce the Code of Practice provisions robustly and urges signatories to adopt a public copyright policy and operate an accessible, time-bound complaint mechanism that provides effective redress for rights holders. 

The Commission is expected to take immediate action without waiting for possible reviews of the Copyright Directive or the AI Act, as the Parliament has emphasized the urgent need for workable solutions in the face of enormous legal uncertainty. The Explanatory Statement accompanying the report suggests that the European legislator or the European Commission should establish an immediate, simple, flat-rate copyright fee for the use of European creators' data, potentially amounting to 5 to 7% of global turnover. 

Takeaways

This report signals a clear intent by the European Parliament to pursue stronger protections for copyright holders in the context of generative AI. Organizations operating in the EU—whether as AI developers, content creators, or digital service providers—should closely monitor developments and assess their exposure to potential new licensing obligations, transparency requirements, and enforcement mechanisms. The establishment of EUIPO as a trusted intermediary for opt-out registrations and licensing may create new compliance processes requiring early preparation.