<
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/11/14/copyright-is-the-wrong-tool-to-deal-with-deepfake-harms/>
"A key theme of
Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) is
that copyright, born in an analogue age of scarcity, works poorly in today’s
digital world of abundance. One manifestation of that is how lawmakers struggle
to adapt the existing copyright rules to deal with novel technological
developments, like the new generation of AI technologies. The EU’s
AI Act
marks a major step in regulating artificial intelligence, but it touches on
copyright only briefly, leaving many copyright-related questions still open.
The process of aligning national copyright laws with the
AI Act provides an
opportunity for EU Member States to flesh out some of the details, and that is
what Italy has done with its new “Disposizioni e deleghe al Governo in materia
di intelligenza artificiale.” (Provisions and delegations to the Government
regarding artificial intelligence). The
Communia blog explains the two main
provisions. The first specifies that only works of human creativity are
eligible for protection under Italian copyright law:
It codifies a crucial principle: while AI can be a tool in the creative
process, copyright protection remains reserved for human-generated
intellectual effort. This positions Italian law in alignment with the
broader international trend, seen in the EU, U.S., and UK, of rejecting full
legal authorship rights for non-human agents such as AI systems. In
practice, this means that works solely generated by AI without significant
human input will likely fall outside the scope of copyright protection.
The second provision deals with the legality of text and data mining (TDM)
activities used in the training of AI models:
This provision essentially reaffirms that text and data mining (TDM) is
permitted under certain conditions, namely where access to the source
materials is lawful and the activity complies with the existing TDM
exceptions under EU copyright law
The Italian AI law is about clarifying existing copyright law to deal with
issues raised by AI. But some EU countries want to go much further in their
response to generative AI, and bring in an entirely new kind of copyright. Both
Denmark and the Netherlands are proposing to give people the copyright to their
body, facial features, and voice. The move is intended as a response to the
rising number of AI-generated deepfakes, where aspects such as someone’s face,
body and voice are used without their permission, often for questionable
purposes, and sometimes for criminal ones. There are good reasons for tackling
deepfakes, as noted in an excellent commentary by P. Bernt Hugenholtz regarding
the proposed Danish and Dutch laws:
Fake porn and other deepfake content is causing serious, and sometimes
irreversible, harm to a person’s integrity and reputation. Fake audio or
video content might deceive or mislead audiences and consumers, poison the
public sphere, induce hatred, manipulate political discourse and undermine
trust in science, journalism, and the public media. Like misinformation more
generally, deepfakes pose a threat to our increasingly fragile democracies.
The problem is not that new laws are being brought in, but that the Danish and
Dutch governments are proposing to use the wrong legal framework – copyright –
to do so"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
