Author, Journalist, Translator Associations Oppose Third Draft of EU AI Code of Practice

On March 22, 2025, the European Council of Literary Translators’ Associations (CEATL), the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), and the European Writers’ Council (EWC) announced they had sent a letter (PDF) to the European Commission for technological sovereignty, security, and democracy and the EU AI Board opposing the third draft of the EU Code of Practice for the implementation of the AI Act. 

The organizations, representing over 550,000 authors across the text sector, argue that the current draft is fundamentally flawed, undermines EU law, disregards the legitimate interests of rightsholders, and favors the AI industry at the expense of creators. 

The signatories express disappointment with the lack of collaboration in the drafting process and call for substantial revisions before the Code of Practice can be considered acceptable. 

They assert that large language models (LLMs) depend entirely on their high-quality creations and decry the current draft as exacerbating the power imbalance between the AI industry and creators, stating that “This makes it even more necessary not to issue any further ‘free ride tickets’ within the Code of Practice, that allow profitable tech companies to exploit individual work and, in the case of book writers, of works created at private economic risk and at personal investment.”

The organizations claim that the Code of Practice is “not fit for purpose” and circumvents EU law, weakening transparency and copyright enforcement. Specific criticisms include the draft’s weak stance against pirated works, insufficient copyright policy obligations, and an over-reliance on Robots.txt.

They find it unacceptable that AI providers are not required to document individual works within their content sets, while authors and translators are required to provide title-specific rights reservations for their own work, further warning that the draft will lead to legal uncertainty and disputes.

In this latest of joint statements, the signatories explicitly state they cannot endorse the Code of Practice unless significant improvements are made and demand that the AI Office refrain from claiming their concerns were genuinely considered — “the active involvement of European authors ought under no circumstance be evoked by the AI Office to help render legitimacy to this Code of Practice.”