Practical guides EU AI Regulation

The first draft of the practical guidelines in accordance with Article 56 of the EU AI Regulation is available and must be adopted by May 2025. These guidelines deal, among other things, with copyright-related obligations under Article 53 of the AI Regulation. Available here.

Important points include:

• Licensing and reservation of rights: Providers must ensure that rights reservations in accordance with the DSM Directive (Directive (EU) 2019/790 (Copyright in the Digital Single Market)) have been taken into account when developing models, i.e. robot.txt entries, but also otherwise declared opt-outs.
• Respecting crawler barriers: Technical barriers to online content must be understood and respected.
• Precautions against overfitting: Providers and developers should take measures against overfitting, because this presumably promotes the infringing reproduction of input content.
• Avoidance of infringing outputs: Providers (including providers of AI-based tools that have not created the models themselves) must take measures to prevent the generation of infringing content. This may also require precautions against misuse by third parties.
• Search engines and TDM rights reservations: In the case of combined search engine/AI providers, findability must not be impaired by TDM rights reservations (text and data mining reservation). In other words: The opt-out from AI crawlers must not be linked to a restriction in the search engine ads.
• Cooperation with rights holders: Development of suitable standards in cooperation with rights holders.
• No pirated material: Measures against the use of pirated material for training. In particular, the known piracy portals and datasets may not be used to train models.

Although these regulations only apply directly to the EU, they could also set standards for Switzerland due to their extraterritorial reflex effect. They should be observed in particular for cross-border offers of AI-based services from Switzerland to the EU.

Do you have any questions? Our partner Kai-Peter Uhlig will be happy to help you.

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