Expert group releases new report on copyright and artificial intelligence

The expert group under Kulturministeriet (the Danish Ministry of Culture) has just delivered its report on copyright and artificial intelligence. Here I review the key points for the education sector, and at the end you can see the remaining recommendations.

The expert group has assessed whether Denmark’s current Copyright Act is adequate in an era of generative AI, where the technology has become a natural part of everyday life. The aim has been to shed light on the highly complex legal challenges posed by language models such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, but also by text-to-image models such as Midjourney and Google’s Nano Banana.

A central point in the report is that the exception in the Copyright Act which permits copying for private use does not apply in educational contexts. Put very plainly, you must NOT upload copyright-protected material to language models.

If protected material is to be used lawfully in teaching, it must still be based on collective licence agreements, for example through Copydan. Here it is the institution’s responsibility to secure the necessary rights, and there is no separate right for individual students or teachers to upload protected material to AI services.

Key recommendations for the education and culture sectors

For teachers, educational leaders, IT advisers and leaders in cultural institutions, three recommendations are particularly worth noting.

Need for clear guidance and information (Recommendation 9)

The expert group points to a need for official guidance and educational materials aimed at institutions, teachers and students. The goal is to create a shared understanding of the legal ground rules and to promote the responsible use of AI services. This recognises that institutions should not be left alone with the responsibility of interpreting complex law.

Technical responsibility with providers (Recommendation 6)

An important recommendation places greater responsibility on tech companies. The expert group proposes that providers of AI services must build in technical safeguards, so-called guardrails, that can identify and limit the use of copyright-protected content. In the longer term, this may ease the burden on individual users and institutions.

Protection of the Danish language and culture

The report expresses concern that the extensive use of AI models, which are primarily trained on English-language data, may dilute the Danish language and culture. For the education and culture sectors, this underlines the importance of continuing to work with Danish-language and original material, and of strengthening users’ critical awareness of the sources on which AI tools are built.

The report’s other recommendations

In addition to the above points, the report contains seven recommendations, which primarily target the legal and commercial frameworks for AI developers and rights holders.

• Recommendation 1.
  Effective transparency in training data
  There must be full transparency about which material AI models are trained on. If a provider cannot document this, it should be assumed that protected material has been used.
  
• Recommendation 2.
  Better options for saying no
  Rights holders must have an effective and practical way to prohibit their material being used for AI training. This is referred to as an opt-out.
  
• Recommendations 3 and 4.
  Strengthened opportunities for agreements
  The framework for collective licence agreements must be improved to make it easier to enter into agreements on the use of protected material. For the media sector, a pilot scheme with compulsory arbitration is proposed to resolve disputes.
  
• Recommendation 5.
  Protection against digital imitations
  Rules should be introduced to protect people’s voices, appearance and other personal characteristics against digital imitation without consent.
  
• Recommendation 7.
  Public prosecution in complex cases
  Anklagemyndigheden (the Danish Prosecution Service) should be able to bring cases concerning copyright infringements in technically and internationally complex AI cases, even if they are not of the most serious nature.
  
• Recommendation 8.
  Support for human-created content
  It should be explored how human-created content can be strengthened if it risks being outcompeted by AI-generated material.
  
• Recommendation 10.
  AI provision as publication
  It should be established in law that when an AI service is made available, it is regarded as a publication in the copyright sense. This strengthens the basis for requiring licence agreements.

Read the full report here:

Expert group wants to make it harder to share copyright-protected material

Kulturministeriet’s principal tasks are ministerial advice and legislative initiatives. Kulturministeriet consists of Kulturministeriet’s department, an agency and approximately 20 state institutions. Kulturministeriet also carries out governance tasks in relation to, among others, state, state-recognised and grant-receiving cultural institutions.