The European Union's AI Act was passed by the European Parliament earlier today, with 523 votes in favour, 46 against and 49 abstentions. An assortment of music industry organisations - and groups representing other copyright industries - have welcomed the result of the vote in a joint statement, declaring that the AI Act is "world-first legislation that regulates the development and use of artificial intelligence and sets an example for responsible AI governance".
"It provides tools for rightsholders to enforce their rights", the statement adds. That includes "obligations on providers of general purpose AI to make available a sufficiently detailed summary of the works used for training their models, to retain detailed technical documentation, and to demonstrate they have put in place policies to comply with EU copyright law, regardless of where they acquired data or trained and developed their AI models".
The AI Act - which is now expected to go into force in May - introduces wide-ranging regulation of AI across the European Union. For the music industry, the main focus is what the act says about transparency and copyright in relation to generative AI.
Music companies insist that tech companies must get permission before making use of existing music to train generative AI models, and also want those companies to state what data has been used as part of the training process.
Both copyright owners and the tech sector lobbied hard throughout last year in a bid to influence the final wording of the act. That was agreed in December and then approved by the EU member states last month. With the act now having also got approval from the Parliament, there will be a new round of lobbying on how key components of the regulations are implemented. Including the specifics regarding those transparency obligations.
With that in mind, today's statement from the copyright industries continues, "We call on the European Parliament to continue to support the development of responsible and sustainable AI by ensuring that these important rules are put into practice in a meaningful and effective way, aligned with the objectives of the regulation".
"To achieve this", it adds, "it is essential that the template for the sufficient level of information that general purpose AI model providers must make available enables effective exercise and enforcement of copyright and other fundamental rights, and that creative sectors and rightsholders are formally and directly involved in its drafting".
Music organisations backing the joint statement include CISAC, GESAC, ICMP, IFPI, IMPALA and IMPF. And if you don't know who any of those guys are, just ask ChatGTP, it'll know.