An Echo Chamber in Copenhagen: The Danish Presidency’s AI Conference Forgets Who Creates the Future

On September 18th, the Danish Presidency of the Council of the European Union will host a  Conference on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence in Copenhagen. An essential topic, at a critical time. The EU is grappling with how to regulate AI, protect creators, and foster innovation. Such a conference should be a vibrant forum where diverse perspectives clash, collaborate, and build consensus.

Instead, a quick look at the agenda reveals a depressingly familiar story: the guest list is a closed loop of the entertainment industry, Big Tech, and regulators. While panels will discuss the concerns of movie studios, record labels, and composers, there is a cavernous silence where the voices of researchers, scientists, librarians, and educators should be. Not a single speaker is slated to represent the vast European research ecosystem, our cultural heritage institutions, or civil society.

This is a profound misstep, reflecting a dangerous and persistent refusal to see creativity as anything more than what can be sold for entertainment. This skewed agenda risks cementing a backward-looking, protectionist view of copyright that will not only fail to address the challenges of AI but will actively harm Europe’s greatest asset: its capacity for research-driven innovation.

A Skewed Guest List for a One-Sided Conversation

The conference program reads less like a balanced debate and more like a negotiation between two familiar adversaries, with regulators mediating.

• Panel I,  EU AI Act and the Correlation with the DSM Directive,  features the European Commission, a university professor, and the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), which represents Big Tech.
• Panel II,  The Use of Al in the Entertainment Industry,  is exactly what it says on the tin, with speakers from the Motion Picture Association (MPA), the Danish game development institute, and an AI artist.
• Panel III,  AI, Value Gap and Collective Licensing,  doubles down on this narrow focus, featuring representatives from authors’ and composers’ societies (GESAC) and the recording industry (IFPI), with CCIA again providing the tech perspective.
• Panel IV,  Judicial Issues with Sound-a-likes and Look-a-likes Using AI,  continues the theme, focusing on issues pertinent to actors and artists.

Across four panels, the story is the same: the concerns of the entertainment industry are amplified, while Big Tech is positioned as the counterpoint. This framework perpetuates the tired narrative of Big Content vs. Big Tech. It’s a conversation dominated by incumbent players focused on protecting market share rather than on building an inclusive, innovation-friendly regulatory environment. This is the very definition of fighting the last war.

Where is the voice for Europe’s universities? For its public and private research labs? For the libraries and archives that curate our collective knowledge? Their complete absence suggests that, in the eyes of the organizers, they are not relevant stakeholders in the debate on copyright and AI. This is a profound and dangerous miscalculation for the representativity of the debate. It is a missed opportunity for EU competitiveness.

The Other Creative Sector: AI as a Partner, Not a Plagiarist

The fundamental flaw in the Copenhagen agenda is its implicit acceptance of a tragically narrow definition of creative industries. Policymakers continue to use this phrase as shorthand for music, film, and the performing arts. This shorthand is not just misleading, it’s dangerous.

As we have explained in a previous post, the creative sector is far broader. WIPO’s own definition encompasses creations of the mind, such as inventions. The UK’s DCMS includes  IT, software, and computer services and R&D as core creative sub-sectors. From pharmacology and climate modeling to social science analyses, the research sector operates at the beating heart of intellectual creativity.

Crucially, this sector views AI in a completely different light. While entertainment stakeholders often frame AI as an existential threat to be contained, the science and research communities see it as a powerful partner in discovery. AI in research isn’t just about replacing tasks—it’s about enhancing them. It helps ‘discover unexpected connections’ and extract value from vast troves of literature, slashing weeks of work into hours.

We’ve already seen AI fast-track the development of COVID-19 vaccines and predict protein folding. It holds the promise of expediting drug discovery, enhancing medical diagnostics, and improving climate change modeling. The primary concern for this massive creative sector is not controlling the market outputs of AI, but ensuring lawful and affordable access to the inputs needed to train these powerful research tools, and avoiding that the exceptions their sector was granted are curtailed by bypasses in publisher contracts.

By excluding the research community, the conference will completely ignore the most significant innovation-related aspect of the AI-copyright nexus. The debate will be about protecting last year’s blockbusters instead of training an AI to screen for early-stage cancer or optimize sustainable agriculture.

This isn’t just a different priority; it’s a different world. And it’s a world Europe can’t afford to legislate into a corner.

An Agenda for Our Future Memory?

The exclusion of one group is particularly disheartening: libraries. These institutions are the stewards of our knowledge and culture, yet their role in the digital ecosystem is under direct threat, a threat deeply intertwined with AI and copyright. 

As highlighted by the recently launched #ProtectOurFutureMemory campaign, our memory institutions are facing a tipping point in their continuity. They have been transformed from owners of knowledge to mere renters, trapped in an unbalanced digital licensing system. Publishers, leveraging near-monopoly power, impose contractual terms that undermine the core mission of libraries.

The scale of this market power is staggering. This summer, Research Professional reported on the latest financial results from the major scholarly publishers. For the first half of 2025, Springer Nature reported a profit margin of 26%, while the scientific, technical, and medical arm of RELX (owner of Elsevier) posted an even higher margin of 37%. To put these figures in perspective, these profits dwarf those of some of the world’s largest companies. Alphabet (Google) runs on a 28% margin, Apple on 24%, while Pfizer and Tesla operate on margins of just 11% and 7%, respectively.

This market position leads to unfair licensing terms and stifles innovation. For example, even before the current AI boom, publishers contractually overrode text and data mining (TDM) rights granted to researchers under EU law. Now, things have gotten worse. Since 2023, some publishers have introduced sweeping contractual prohibitions on using licensed content with any AI tools.

Think about the absurdity. A conference on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence will take place without a single representative from the institutions on the front lines, who are being contractually blocked by rightsholders from allowing the use of AI on content they have lawfully licensed.

Without libraries and other memory institutions at the table, the conversation is disconnected from the reality of how knowledge is accessed and used. Europe risks creating policy that subverts public access to knowledge and allows commercial power to continue to erode the foundations of equitable knowledge access.

A Call for a Bigger Table

The unbalanced agenda of the conference is not an isolated incident. It reflects a policy-making process that is too often captured by the loudest and best-funded voices. The entertainment sector is loud and experienced in lobbying; the research community, less so. The result is inertia, where the interests of a vital, innovative sector get steamrolled.

This has to change. The EU has a narrow window to get its policy on AI and copyright right. The worst-case scenario is not a flawed compromise; it’s paralysis or, even worse, a perfectly balanced compromise between two poles of a debate that leaves out the most important part of the ecosystem. If Europe wants to lead on responsible AI, it must embrace flexible, forward-looking frameworks.

We call on the Danish Presidency of the Council of the European Union to acknowledge this profound imbalance. It is not too late to add new speakers, to moderate the panels in a way that actively questions the incumbent narrative, and to publicly recognize the essential role of the research and cultural heritage sectors in this debate.

We urge policymakers in the European Parliament and the Commission to look beyond these curated industry events. Actively seek out the perspectives of your own research communities. Listen to your librarians.

Cultural value isn’t undermined by technology. It’s eroded by incumbents that cling to outdated systems, reject change, and define every evolution as a threat. An AI policy built in an echo chamber will protect the past at the expense of the future. Europe must choose: does it want to protect models from the past, or shape the future? 

Because, as we stated before, a copyright policy that only protects yesterday’s outputs will never build tomorrow’s breakthroughs.

Written by Caroline De Cock, LL.M. , Head of Research.