AI and Intellectual Property: What Is Changing in Europe
The EU AI Act introduces new transparency and copyright compliance obligations. Important questions concerning licensing and fair remuneration for rightsholders, however, remain unresolved.
The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence is creating new possibilities for music, alongside significant questions concerning the use of protected works, transparency, licensing and remuneration for rightsholders.
In the European Union, the AI Act is now moving from legislation to implementation. Since 2 August 2025, providers placing general-purpose AI models on the European market have been required to maintain a policy for compliance with EU copyright and related rights law. This includes identifying and respecting rights reservations and publishing a sufficiently detailed summary of the content used to train their models.
From 2 August 2026, the European Commission’s enforcement powers concerning these obligations also became applicable. New transparency rules for AI-generated or manipulated content entered into application at the same time. These include requirements for synthetic or manipulated content, including audio, to be marked in a machine-readable format so that it can be detected as artificially generated.
These measures strengthen transparency, but they do not automatically resolve every issue affecting the music community. The AI Act does not provide a general authorisation to use protected works for model training, nor does it establish a complete licensing or remuneration system for rightsholders.
In March 2026, the European Parliament called for greater transparency, fair remuneration and an effective ability for rightsholders to control the use of their protected content. The resolution represents an important political direction, but it does not in itself create a new binding licensing framework.
For music publishers, these developments make accurate works documentation, high-quality metadata, effective monitoring and clear licensing mechanisms even more important.
HMPA supports the responsible development of technology, based on transparency, licensing and fair remuneration whenever protected musical works are used.
