EWC Statement at WIPO’s SCCR, 44th Session, November 2023

As the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) held the 44th session of its Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) in November 2023 EWC’s Secretary General Nicole Pfister Fetz submitted on behalf of the European Writers’ Council the following statement on the Proposal by the EU for an “AI Information Session” during one of the next SCCR meetings.

The EWC highly welcomes the proposal to organise further constructive activities on the challenges that generative AI poses to authors.

It has been proven that large language models, the basis of generative text robotik such as ChatGPT, have been built from copyrighted book works without consent by the authors – and whose sources are, among others, shadow libraries and piracy websites. Here it needs to be clarified on how this violation of intellectual property rights under the Berne Convention can be remedied.

Without legal regulation, generative technologies that reproduce cultural human works, accelerate the legitimisation of copyright infringement and collective licensing remuneration fraud.

We ask you kindly to take two aspects into consideration:

• On the AI input: To clarify, that machine learning for generative AI and its copyright related processes are NOT covered by TDM
• On the AI output: To clarify the need of labelling and full transparency