Article by Arthur Mensch: “Europe is a land of creators. The continent has nurtured ideas that have enriched, and continue to enrich, the world’s intellectual and creative landscape. Its diverse and multilingual heritage remains one of its greatest strengths, central not only to its identity and soft power but also to its economic vitality.
All this is at risk as AI reshapes the global knowledge economy.
Major AI companies in the US and China are developing their models under permissive or non-existent copyright rules, training them domestically on vast amounts of content — including from European sources.
European AI developers, by contrast, operate in a fragmented legal environment that places them at a competitive disadvantage. The current opt-out framework, designed to enable rights holders to protect their content and prevent AI companies from using it for training if they say so, has proven unworkable in practice. Copyrighted works continue to spread uncontrollably online, while the legal mechanisms designed to protect them remain patchy, inconsistently applied and overly complex.
The result is a framework that satisfies no one. Rights holders correctly fear for their livelihoods yet see no clear path to protection. AI developers face legal uncertainty that hampers investment and growth.
Europe needs to explore a new approach.
At Mistral, we are proposing a revenue-based levy that would be applied to all commercial providers placing AI models on the market or putting them into service in Europe, reflecting their use of content publicly available online…(More)”.
