European Parliament resolution on copyright and generative AI

IRIS 2026-3:1/7

Amélie Lacourt

European Audiovisual Observatory

On 10 March 2026, the European Parliament adopted a long-awaited resolution on copyright and generative AI (Resolution 2025/2058(INI)), presenting opportunities and challenges regarding the use of copyrighted works by AI models and systems and how to ensure transparency and fair remuneration of rights holders. The report, led by MEP Axel Voss, was voted 460 in favour, to 71 against, with 88 abstentions.

In its Resolution, the Parliament addresses the increasing use of generative AI systems that rely massively on protected content, without authorisation from, or compensation for, the rights holders. This is presented as particularly concerning when such content is integrated into search engines or other digital services that enable the generation, often in real time and at marginal cost, of content that infringes original works and other protected subject matter on which the models were trained, or that was scraped. Concerned that these practices may result in the provision of products and services that directly and unfairly compete with those of rights holders, the Parliament has presented a set of recommendations.

In this regard, the resolution notably highlights the issue of licensing copyrighted material and calls for an additional legal framework to clarify licensing rules for generative AI and facilitate the establishment of voluntary collective licensing agreements. While acknowledging that voluntary licensing, whether individual or collective, underpins the success of the creative sectors, the Parliament also stresses that rights holders must remain free to set corresponding remuneration. It therefore calls on the European Commission to examine possible solutions for the immediate, fair and proportionate remuneration of past uses of copyright-protected works by providers of general-purpose AI models and systems, where a licensing market has not yet been established for content protected by copyright or related rights.

It should also be noted that the resolution insists that content fully generated by AI which does not meet the established criteria for copyright protection should remain ineligible for such protection and that the public domain status of such outputs should be clearly determined.

The resolution also emphasises the need to protect the news media sector, highlighting in particular the growing use of generative AI to aggregate or present news content and its far-reaching effects on access to and diversity of information. Rights holders from the press and news media sector, press publishers, journalists and news editors must have full control over the digital use of their content by AI systems and models, including for training purposes, inferencing, and retrieval-augmented generation. The report highlights that such control should be based on a robust and functioning possibility to exclude such use by AI systems and models, underpinned by full transparency and source documentation regarding the use of third-party content.