At CISAC's general assembly in Paris, 227 authors' societies from around the world endorsed a French proposal to flip the burden of proof in AI copyright disputes. French society SACEM then took that backing to lawmakers.
The proposal, named after Senator Laure Darcos, targets a practical problem: rights holders rarely know whether their work went into a training set. Under the bill, an AI company accused of infringement would be presumed to have used the work unless it could show it had not. SACEM stresses that this creates no new rights and only makes existing French and EU rights enforceable, adding that the EU AI Act's transparency rules have so far achieved little.
SACEM called unlicensed AI training the biggest plundering of creative work in history and appealed to France's role in inventing modern copyright and collective management.
The Senate passed the bill in April, but it has since stalled in the National Assembly. It was scheduled for that Thursday as the last item of the day, which Reporters Without Borders, a supporter, said left almost no chance of it being debated.
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