DSM Directive
More info
- Reference
- Directive (EU) 2019/790
- Released
- 2019
- Type
- EU directive
The EU's 2019 copyright directive, best known for upload filters but now most important for governing how AI models may be trained.
The public fight was almost entirely about Article 17 (Article 13 in the drafts), which makes large platforms liable for copyright infringement in what their users upload. In practice that can't be done without automated filters. Poland challenged it at the EU Court of Justice and lost in 2022. After lobbying by GitHub among others, open source development platforms were explicitly carved out.
Articles 3 and 4 drew barely any attention in 2019 but have become the ones that matter. They permit text and data mining: freely for research, and for everyone else unless the rights holder has opted out in machine-readable form. The AI Act points straight to them. The directive sits alongside the older Software Directive, which still governs software as such.