STM—the Dutch-based trade group and self-proclaimed “standard bearer for the academic publishing industry”—joined over a dozen media-related associations to applaud passage of the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act. The reason, of course, is the promise of AI training revenue from big U.S. tech firms:
[The Act] provides first tools for rightsholders to enforce their rights, including the obligations on providers of General Purpose AI (GPAI) 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 scope of enforcement—together with the outcome of the US Copyright Office’s review and various court rulings—will determine how and whether the big five academic publisher-oligopolists squeezes still-more profit from our unpaid scholarship.