Paper by Paul Keller: “…Our proposal starts from the observation that individual licensing cannot resolve this. A licensing market, no matter how well it functions, cannot reach most of the content on which AI models are trained. Where licensing does happen, it happens between the largest AI developers and the largest rightholders. It leaves out the long tail of individual creators and small rightholders, and it leaves out smaller AI developers. The way out is to stop trying to reconcile these objectives transaction by transaction, and to do it collectively instead…
The obligation is triggered by the commercial supply, on the EU market, of access to AI models trained on publicly available content. It applies wherever the company is established and wherever the model was trained. Companies pay a percentage of the EU revenue from the supply of model access into a single EU-level fund. In exchange, training on publicly available content is no longer subject to individual reservations under Article 4 of the CDSM Directive.
The remuneration takes the form of a statutory remuneration claim that cannot be waived and is subject to mandatory collective management. Research, and the development and release of models under open-source licences, fall outside the obligation; it arises only when such a model is commercially supplied.
Rightholders keep control, but they exercise it through access rather than through reservations. Content behind paywalls or other access controls stays outside the mechanism and remains available for licensing. Uses at the point of inference, such as retrieval-augmented generation and grounding, are unaffected by the proposal.
The fund splits the proceeds between two destinations. The larger part goes to creators and rightholders through collective management organisations, with a guaranteed share reserved for authors and performers. A significant, fixed share goes to the stewards of publicly available content: cultural heritage institutions such as libraries, archives and museums, open knowledge projects and public service media…(More)”.
