Publication: EU Policies on AI's Impact on Media and Creative Industries. An In-Depth Policy Report
Authors
Aguado, Juan Miguel ; Schädel, Nicolai ; Martínez Martínez, Inmaculada José
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info:eu-repo/semantics/report
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Abstract
Between 2019 and 2026 the European Union assembled the world's most ambitious regulatory architecture for artificial intelligence (AI) in media and creative industries, built around twelve principal instruments — the AI Act, DSA, DMA, Data Act, Data Governance Act, GDPR, EMFA, AVMSD, DSM Directive, TTPA, Platform Work Directive and revised Product Liability Directive — intersecting with sector-specific codes (the GPAI Code of Practice, the Code on Marking and Labelling of AI-Generated Content, the Disinformation Code integrated into the DSA, the Creative Europe programme and the Apply AI Strategy / GenAI4EU). Yet density does not equal coherence. Mapping this framework across seven media and creative ecosystems — news, advertising, audiovisual, music, radio and podcast, video games and content creators / UGC — through a template covering policy objective, legal status, sectoral relevance, ecosystem implications, stakeholder impact and foreseeable consequences, three structural findings emerge. First, the framework is binding and operational, but its enforcement architecture (AI Office, EBDS, EDPB, EBMS, ERGA, EDMO, EUIPO and national authorities) is fragmented and partially deferred by the November 2025 Digital Omnibus simplification package, whose trilogue stalled on 28 April 2026. Second, the framework is sectorally uneven: copyright and data protection are addressed in depth, while labour, infrastructural and cultural-diversity dimensions remain under-regulated, and music, news and audiovisual rightsholders enjoy stronger procedural protections than UGC creators, podcasters or independent game developers. Third, the most consequential 2025–2026 frontier — applying the DSM Directive's text-and-data-mining (TDM) opt-out to generative AI training, mediated by Article 53 of the AI Act, the GPAI Code, EUIPO's Copyright Knowledge Centre and the European Parliament's resolution of 10 March 2026 — remains technically unresolved, with direct consequences for the seven ecosystems and for non-European creators whose works appear in EU-trained corpora. Together, these findings show that generative AI re-centralises power around foundation-model and platform infrastructures, and that ecosystem-level governance will require consistent enforcement, an interoperable copyright infrastructure (machine-readable opt-outs, provenance standards, collective licensing), labour safeguards adapted to atypical creative work, and a substantially better-resourced cultural policy able to sustain linguistic and editorial diversity under conditions of synthetic abundance
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Citation
Aguado, J.M.; Martino, I.J. & Schädel, N. (2026) EU Policies on AI's Impact on Media and Creative Industries. An In-Depth Policy Report. CreAitiveMedIA Project, 2026
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