The EU AI copyright playbook: The TDM exception and AI Act's transparency requirements

Artificial intelligence has uprooted traditional copyright protections, testing the limits of the current legal framework. This upheaval stems from the vast amount of information used to train AI models, especially generative AI models, which often includes data protected by copyright law. 

In the EU, these issues have been discussed in the context of the frameworks of the Copyright and Information Society Directive and the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive. EU institutions have taken steps toward trying to explain or anticipate how EU legislation should be applied. A study by the EU Intellectual Property Office focused on the development of generative AI and its implications for copyright law. In November 2025, it expanded its work by launching the Copyright Knowledge Centre. 

Similarly, the European Parliament released a report focused on providing recommendations, such as giving developers a proactive responsibility to document the origins of their datasets. The report also recommends establishing a balanced regulatory ecosystem that allows for responsible innovation and creating remuneration schemes to protect rightsholders against literal copying and in recognition of the influence that protected works may have on outputs.  

In parallel, litigation over generative AI has appeared in EU member state courts and on the docket of the Court of Justice of the European Union. Decisions from the lower courts have outlined how to develop an AI model in a manner that complies with copyright law. At the same time, the EU AI Act incorporates transparency obligations for model developers, including requirements to disclose information on the origin of model training data. The intent of such requirements is to empower rightsholders to exercise their rights.