From 15^th-16^th September, the Observatory of the EUIPO in Alicante / Spain held its annual plenary meeting. MEPs, European Commission representatives and IP stakeholders and observers participated in the plenary and discussed ongoing IP policies, impacts, and enforcement. 

The EWC was welcomed as new EUIPO Observatory stakeholder, presented by EWC President Sebastià Portell.

Together with EWC Secretary General Nicole Pfister Fetz and Nina George, EWC Political Commissioner, the EWC discussed copyright infrastructures, as a follow-up to the CommonsDB conference and workshop the day before, and learned more about current actions by the European Commission against non-compliant companies related to the obligations of the DSA, DMA, and the AI ACT.

EWC denounced the opaque transparency by BigTech regarding the template – useless for any IP enforcement, especially in relation to Anthropic’s Project Panama: print books are scanned, destroyed and exploited for AI, without any meta data trace or option to declare an opt-out. 

EWC’s key points for the discussion:

• Authors and rightsholders have repeatedly stated that the word ‘register’ refers too strongly to the idea of mandatory registering copyright protected works.
• We are also convinced that any voluntarily / non-authoritative and auditable opt-out ‘directory’ must include mechanisms to ensure transparency on the part of AI developers to confirm rights reservations.
• Not about us without us: the launch of a targeted pilot project shall always involve writers from step 1 – as we are the original rightsowners of any “AI”-related right and the most exploited group since the advent of generative technologies.