Re: TDMRep : position of the EU Commission about TDM vs AI

Dear members of the TDMRep CG, 

We were given a link to an "Answer given by Mr Breton on behalf of the European Commission", to a question raise by M. Emmanuel Maurel. 

Here is the question -> https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2023-000479_EN.html <https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2023-000479_EN.html>
and the answer -> https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2023-000479-ASW_EN.html <https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2023-000479-ASW_EN.html> 

From this answer it is clear that for the EU Commission, the use of web content by AI solutions falls into the scope of the Articles 3 and 4 of the DSM Directive. 

Note the broad definition the EU Commission gives to TDM ("means any automated analytical technique aimed at analysing text and data in digital form in order to generate information which includes but is not limited to patterns, trends and correlations").

Best regards
Laurent Le Meur / EDRLab


> Le 5 avr. 2023 à 13:13, Laurent Le Meur <laurent@edrlab.org> a écrit :
> 
> Dear members of the TDMRep CG, 
> 
> the notes of our first 2023 call will be published soon. But before that I wanted to send the link to this interesting article published on openfuture.eu.
> 
> https://openfuture.eu/blog/protecting-creatives-or-impeding-progress/
> 
> Its position is clear about "ML = TDM":  "The CDSM Directive defines text and data mining as “any automated analytical technique aimed at analyzing text and data in digital form in order to generate information which includes but is not limited to patterns, trends and correlations.” This definition clearly covers current approaches to machine learning that rely heavily on correlations between observed characteristics of training data. The use of copyrighted works as part of the training data is exactly the type of use that was foreseen when the TDM exception was drafted."
> 
> Happy to get your thoughts about this article *
> 
> Other notes: 
> 
> - Creative Commons is also working on the subject of "better sharing for generative AI", has organized a set of webinars on the subject in February (with US people mainly from what I see), and is publishing a set of blog posts on AI -> https://creativecommons.org/tag/ai/. 
> 
> - "Stability AI plans to let artists opt out of Stable Diffusion 3 image training"
> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/stability-ai-plans-to-let-artists-opt-out-of-stable-diffusion-3-image-training/
> 
> - Some companies are building AI opt-out tools, which may lead to a large fragmentation of efforts for authors: e.g. https://spawning.ai/ (thanks to Claudia for the link)
> 
> 
> (*) I personally don't understand one of the last paragraphs, which seems to contradict the rest of the article: "For now, this opt-in approach to copyright is limited to TDM, but it is not inconceivable that this approach could be expanded if it proves to work in practice, especially in the ongoing discussion about ML training."
> 
> 
> Best regards
> Laurent Le Meur
>