In France, a recent bipartisan bill proposing the establishment of a “presumption of use” of cultural content by artificial intelligence companies seeks to help rights-holders negotiate with companies such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, and Mistral AI for compensation for the use of their work to train AI models. The bill, sponsored by Senator Laure Darcos and introduced by Deputy of the National Assembly, Emmanuel Maurel, was approved by both the State Council (le Conseil d’État) and the Senate in a unanimous vote.
In what is perceived to be an effort to obstruct the bill’s instauration, however, the National Assembly approved 110 amendments, mostly proposed by Ensemble Pour la République, the major coalition founded by President Emmanuel Macron. In so doing, the French government effectively obstructed the implementation process, ensuring that the bill would not be debated upon or adopted on time, all under the pretext of making France “the home of AI”.
The SNE, together with other French cultural enterprises, creative industries, and rights-holding organizations, strongly believes that technological innovation cannot come at the expense of the creators’ fundamental rights to compensation or be built on the widespread theft of authors’ works.
You can read the original statement at the following link: