EU Copyright Directive: Article 17, Press Right, and AI Training

The EU Copyright Directive, formally Directive (EU) 2019/790 on copyright in the Digital Single Market, is the European Union’s overhaul of copyright rules for online use. Adopted by the European Parliament and the Council in April 2019, it replaces a framework that dated back to 2001 and rewrites how platforms, publishers, researchers, and individual creators interact with copyrighted material online. It makes large user-upload platforms directly liable for infringing content, gives press publishers a new right to negotiate with news aggregators, requires every member state to allow certain uses for research, education, and cultural preservation, and forces companies that license work from authors and performers to pay them fairly and account for how the work is used.

Who and What the Directive Covers

The rules apply to any service operating within the EU market, regardless of where the company is headquartered. A platform based in the United States or South Korea must comply if it offers access to users in the European Economic Area. The types of content covered are broad: recorded music, film, literary works, scientific journals, photographs, and news publications all fall within scope.

The platform-liability rules focus on what the directive calls Online Content-Sharing Service Providers: services whose main purpose (or one of their main purposes) is storing and giving the public access to large amounts of copyrighted material uploaded by users, which the platform organizes and promotes for profit.¹ Think YouTube, not Dropbox. Services that merely store files for personal use, open-source code repositories, non-profit encyclopedias, online marketplaces, and business-to-business cloud services are explicitly excluded.²

Article 17 and Platform Liability

Article 17 is the directive’s most consequential provision. It establishes that when a platform gives the public access to copyrighted material uploaded by users, the platform itself is performing an act of “communication to the public,” which is the legal trigger for copyright liability.¹ That single change flips the old framework. Instead of platforms being shielded until notified of specific infringements, they are directly liable unless they take affirmative steps.

The simplest option is to get a license from rights holders, which then covers both the platform and the user who uploaded the content. When no license exists, a platform can avoid liability only by meeting three conditions, all of which must be satisfied:

Best efforts to get authorization. The platform must proactively reach out to rights holders, especially collective management organizations representing large catalogs of works.
Best efforts to block identified works. When a rights holder provides the necessary information about specific works, the platform must use effective tools to prevent those works from appearing. This is the provision that critics call the “upload filter” requirement.
Notice and stay-down. When a rights holder sends a notice about infringing content, the platform must remove it quickly and prevent future re-uploads of the same material.

What counts as “best” depends on context. The directive requires a proportionality assessment that considers the size and audience of the service, the type of content its users typically upload, and the availability and cost of suitable filtering tools.² A small music-sharing site is not held to the same standard as YouTube.

New platforms get a lighter regime. If a service has been available in the EU for less than three years and has an annual turnover below €10 million, it only needs to show it made best efforts to get authorization and acted quickly on takedown notices. It does not need to proactively block content before it goes live.¹ Once a platform exceeds either threshold, the full set of obligations kicks in.

What Users Who Upload Content Keep

The directive does not give rights holders unchecked power to suppress user uploads. Article 17(7) says that cooperation between platforms and rights holders must not result in legitimate content being blocked, and every member state must transpose mandatory exceptions allowing users to upload content that relies on quotation, criticism, review, caricature, parody, or pastiche.² These exceptions are not optional. A meme that parodies a copyrighted song, or a video essay that quotes a film for criticism, is supposed to survive an automated filter.

Automated content recognition is imperfect. The directive acknowledges this by prohibiting any general monitoring obligation and by requiring platforms to build a complaint and redress mechanism that includes human review. If your upload gets blocked, you can challenge the decision. The platform must process complaints without undue delay, and if the rights holder does not respond within a reasonable timeframe, the content should be restored.² Member states must also make out-of-court dispute resolution available beyond the platform’s own system.

Poland challenged Article 17 before the Court of Justice of the European Union, arguing that the filtering obligations violated the right to freedom of expression. In April 2022, the court dismissed the challenge, ruling that the safeguards built into Article 17 were sufficient to protect fundamental rights.³

The Press Publishers’ Right

Article 15 creates a new “neighboring right” for press publishers, giving them legal standing to negotiate licensing fees when news aggregators and search engines display their content. Before this directive, aggregators could freely show headlines, thumbnails, and preview text without paying publishers. Now online service providers need authorization for digital use of press publications.⁴

The right has limits. It does not cover non-commercial use by individual readers, and it does not apply to hyperlinks or to “individual words or very short extracts” of a press publication. The directive provides no exact character count for what qualifies as a very short extract, leaving that determination to national courts. The right expires two years after publication, calculated from January 1 of the year following the date of publication.⁵

The press publishers’ right does not override the rights of individual authors whose work appears in a publication. A freelance journalist whose article runs in a newspaper keeps their own copyright and can exploit their work independently. Publishers must also give authors an appropriate share of the revenue they receive from licensing under Article 15. Enforcement has already produced disputes: France was the first country to transpose Article 15, and its competition authority fined Google €500 million in 2021 for failing to negotiate in good faith with French publishers.

Mandatory Copyright Exceptions

The directive carves out several areas where copyrighted material can be used without permission. Unlike earlier EU copyright law, where most exceptions were optional, these are mandatory. Every member state must include them in national law.

Text and Data Mining

Article 3 allows research organizations and cultural heritage institutions to mine text and data from works they have lawful access to, such as through library subscriptions or open-access databases. This exception exists specifically for scientific research and cannot be overridden by contract.⁴

Article 4 goes further, creating a general text and data mining exception available to anyone, including commercial companies. The catch is that rights holders can opt out by expressly reserving their rights “in an appropriate manner, such as machine-readable means in the case of content made publicly available online.” A website can block commercial data mining by including a machine-readable tag that signals the reservation.⁶

Education

Article 5 allows schools and universities to use copyrighted works for digital teaching activities, provided the use is non-commercial, takes place within a secure electronic environment, and credits the source and author. This covers sharing excerpts of a novel on a class portal or displaying images in an online lecture. Member states can allow licensing schemes to take priority over the exception when adequate licenses are easily available.

Preservation and Out-of-Commerce Works

Article 6 gives museums, libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage institutions the right to make copies of works permanently in their collections for preservation purposes.⁷ A deteriorating film reel or a crumbling manuscript can be digitized without negotiating a license.

Articles 8 through 11 address works that are still under copyright but no longer commercially available. A book out of print for decades, or a photograph that was never intended for commercial distribution, sits in legal limbo unless the rights holder can be tracked down. The directive allows cultural heritage institutions to make these out-of-commerce works available online in two ways. A collective management organization representing the relevant type of work can issue a license on behalf of all rights holders, including those who never specifically authorized it. Where no such organization exists, institutions can rely on a copyright exception to digitize and share the works directly.

Rights holders retain the ability to opt out. Institutions and collective management organizations must publish information about the out-of-commerce works on a portal run by the EU Intellectual Property Office at least six months before making them publicly accessible, giving rights holders time to object.

How the Directive Applies to AI Training

The text and data mining provisions were drafted before generative AI took off, but they have become the central framework governing AI training in the EU. Article 4’s general TDM exception determines whether AI companies can lawfully feed copyrighted material into their models.

The opt-out mechanism under Article 4 is where this gets contentious. An AI company can mine any publicly available content unless the rights holder has expressly reserved their rights in an appropriate manner, with machine-readable signals suggested for online content. Many publishers and news organizations have added such signals, but enforcement remains uneven. The opt-out puts the burden on rights holders to act, and smaller creators may lack the technical knowledge to implement machine-readable reservations. AI developers, for their part, have argued that broad opt-outs would cripple their ability to build competitive models.

The scientific research exception under Article 3 is more straightforward. Research institutions mining data for non-commercial purposes do not need to worry about opt-outs at all, and rights holders cannot override this exception through contract terms or technical restrictions.

Fair Pay and Transparency for Creators

Articles 18 through 23 tackle the power imbalance between individual creators and the companies that distribute their work. A songwriter who signs away rights to a record label, or a screenwriter who transfers copyright to a studio, often has little visibility into how much money their work generates.

Article 18 establishes that authors and performers are entitled to “appropriate and proportionate remuneration” when they license or transfer their rights. This is a floor, and it applies regardless of what the original contract says.

Article 19 backs that principle with a transparency obligation. At least once a year, anyone who has acquired rights from an author or performer must provide up-to-date, relevant, and comprehensive information about how the work has been exploited, including all revenues generated and remuneration due.⁸ If a sub-licensee down the chain holds the relevant information, it flows back up.

Article 20 provides a contract adjustment mechanism, sometimes called the “bestseller clause.” If a creator’s agreed compensation turns out to be disproportionately low compared to the revenues their work eventually generates, they can demand additional payment. This protects against the classic scenario where a writer sells a manuscript for a modest flat fee and it becomes a hit.

Article 22 gives creators a revocation right. If a rights holder sits on a work and does not exploit it, the author or performer can reclaim their rights. This prevents companies from acquiring rights purely to shelve a project or block competition. These protections are mandatory and cannot be waived by contract. They also apply to contracts that existed before the directive took effect.

Implementation Across EU Member States

Unlike an EU regulation, which applies directly and identically in every country, a directive sets a result each member state must achieve through its own national legislation. The transposition deadline was June 7, 2021.⁶ Most countries missed it. The European Commission launched infringement proceedings against multiple member states, sending formal notices to countries including Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Denmark, among others.

National implementation varies. France implemented Article 15 early and backed it with aggressive enforcement from its competition authority. Germany’s implementation of Article 17 included detailed provisions on automated filtering and user rights that went beyond the directive’s minimum requirements. The core rules are consistent across the EU, but procedural details and enforcement intensity differ from country to country.

When a member state fails to transpose a directive, the European Commission can refer the matter to the Court of Justice of the European Union. If the violation continues after an initial court ruling, the Commission can request financial penalties, which the court sets based on the severity of the breach, how long the law has gone unimplemented, and the country’s ability to pay.⁹ The penalties are designed to compel compliance, not to punish. For anyone dealing with copyright issues in the EU in practice, that means checking the transposing statute in the specific member state, since the day-to-day rules live there rather than in the directive itself.

1
EUR-Lex. Guidance on Article 17 of Directive 2019/790 on Copyright in the Digital Single Market
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EUR-Lex. Guidance on Article 17 of Directive 2019/790 on Copyright in the Digital Single Market
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EUR-Lex. Case C-401/19 Republic of Poland v European Parliament and Council
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EUR-Lex. Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council
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IPPT.eu. Article 15 Directive (EU) 2019/790
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European Parliament. Modernisation of European Copyright Rules: Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market
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Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. Summary of Articles of Directive (EU) 2019/790
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World Intellectual Property Organization. Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council
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European Commission. Infringement Procedure