Generative AI and Copyright in the European Union: Transparency, Copyright Compliance, and the AI Act

Abstract

This study explores the relationship between generative artificial intelligence and copyright law in the European Union (EU), focusing on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) and its interplay with the existing EU copyright acquis. It distinguishes between two questions that are often conflated: whether AI-generated or AI-assisted content deserves copyright protection, and whether the providers and deployers of AI systems that produce such content bear regulatory responsibilities. Applying doctrinal legal research to the AI Act, the study examines the treatment of general-purpose AI models, copyright-compliance policies, training-content summaries, synthetic-content transparency, documentation, institutional supervision and adaptive codes of practice. It also places these obligations alongside the Court of Justice’s originality standard, which has so far been tied to the author’s own intellectual creation expressed through free and creative choices. The study concludes that the EU framework works best in relation to provider accountability, provenance and transparency, but that some important output-side copyright issues remain to be addressed by the existing copyright framework. In that light, it suggests strengthening the links between AI law and copyright law without turning the AI Act into a copyright-specific law.