Europe's AI copyright legal landscape looks very different from the US

[Merchant89]

A legal analysis from Dutch law firm Stibbe warns that technology companies training AI in Europe face a structurally different legal environment than the US, since fair use, the flexible doctrine that's central to ongoing American AI copyright cases, simply doesn't exist under Dutch or EU law. Unlike the US, where Anthropic became the first major AI company to settle a copyright class action, agreeing to pay authors 1.5 billion dollars in 2025, EU copyright exceptions are exhaustively listed and narrowly interpreted, meaning if a specific use doesn't fit one of those defined exceptions, it's infringement, full stop, with no judicial discretion to invent new exceptions

The EU's text and data mining exceptions allow scraping for AI training only if rights holders haven't opted out, typically through a machine readable robots.txt file, and a German court has already ruled against OpenAI in a case brought by music rights group GEMA, finding that when a model memorizes protected works and can reproduce them in outputs, that goes beyond what the exception permits. A major EU top court ruling on text and data mining in generative AI specifically is expected in 2027, following an Advocate General opinion due this month

The analysis warns that the Netherlands' WAMCA mass litigation law, which has already produced more than 100 collective claims worth tens of billions of euros including privacy claims against TikTok, gives rights organizations a ready made legal infrastructure to bring large scale AI copyright claims, and that developing case law on EU-wide jurisdiction means such a claim may be a question of timing rather than probability. Curious what people think this means practically for AI companies operating globally, does Europe's stricter framework meaningfully change how these companies actually train their models, or mostly just increase legal costs without changing underlying practices

AI Copyright Claims in Europe: Key Considerationswww.stibbe.com