The Estonian Actors' Union has objected to the European Union's proposed digital omnibus package, which would change the General Data Protection Regulation. Its head, Reimo Sagor, told ERR that the changes would loosen the rules on processing personal data and let AI developers use actors' faces, voices, likenesses and movements to train systems without separate permission, proper transparency or payment. He said this already happens, but the new rules would make it legal, which the union cannot accept.
He said the ambiguities in the draft would hand developers, who need data to build their systems, an opening to use people's personal data freely. Sagor's second worry is the definition of personal data itself. If an AI learns how a particular actor moves, he argued, that movement pattern is the actor's personal data, but the new wording might not count it as such if it cannot be tied to a named person at that moment. Studios could then use it to recreate the performer from their movements alone, and the actor would have no say. The union wants the current GDPR wording respected and its protections strengthened rather than diluted.
The union wants the Estonian government to speak up clearly at home and in Brussels, together with the International Federation of Actors, so that the omnibus does not weaken or blur the existing protections. Sagor said Estonia has done too little to protect actors, musicians and singers from AI. The union has already opted its members out of AI training, says so on its website, and wants anyone who wishes to use their performances for AI to ask first.
Culture minister Heidy Purga said the ministry had received the union's letter, agreed with it and would defend actors' rights. She said copyright and AI will be on the agenda when Nordic-Baltic (NB8) culture ministers meet in Tallinn in early October, and that small countries need to agree common positions because a single voice carries little weight. She said the matter would be taken up soon, and that the aim of the Tallinn talks is for small countries to reach agreements and back one another on AI and copyright.
Kristi Värk, who heads data protection law at the Ministry of Justice and Digital Affairs, said the ministry understood the concern but that the provision is still being debated in the Council of the EU, so it is too early to say how the final text will read. Estonia's position is that every legal basis, consent included, must hold when AI is developed, with extra safeguards still to be worked out.
Sources · 1