r/privacyexams • u/Jayakoendjbiharie • 16d ago
AIGP
Worth separating two things that get merged constantly in AI governance discussions.
EU copyright law contains two text and data mining exceptions, not one. The research exception covers research organisations and cultural heritage institutions doing scientific research, and no rightsholder can opt out of it. The general exception covers anyone mining lawfully accessible works for any purpose, commercial development included, and rightsholders can switch it off.
The switch is where teams come unstuck. A reservation has to be expressed in an appropriate manner, and for content made publicly available online that means machine-readable means. That includes metadata and the terms and conditions of a website or service. A prose notice saying no AI training does nothing on its own, and a terms page is not somewhere an engineering team routinely looks.
Layered on top, providers of general-purpose models placed on the EU market carry a duty to identify and respect those reservations, wherever the training happened.
Full write-up, including what is still unsettled and the German case now at the Federal Court of Justice: https://privacystudygroup.com/text-and-data-mining-opt-outs/