Secretary General's May Digest

The EU Culture Ministers’ Council meeting 

The Culture Ministers met on 13 May and discussed several topics: they approved conclusions on supporting young artists and cultural and creative professionals in starting their careers, they assessed the legal framework for audiovisual media services and video-sharing platform services, they discussed the future Creative Europe programme, and the upcoming strategic framework for culture known as the “Culture Compass”. At the initiative of Spain, Portugal and Italy, they also addressed the value of the culture and creative sectors in the development of AI, calling for safeguarding copyright and related rights and ensuring transparency in the Code of Practice under the AI Act.

Ahead of the meeting, the SAA participated in two initiatives (see below) along with other organisations from across the Europe's film and audiovisual sector:

• A letter to the ministers to ask for sector-specific EU funding programmes, to make sure that Europe's cultural and creative ecosystem can stay resilient and competitive.
• We also signed a Global Declaration for Artistic Freedom, Cultural Diversity and Cultural Sovereignty with over 100 organisations worldwide in which we urged all governments to stand firm and protect the systems that support independent film and audiovisual creation. The declaration is now open as a petition to sign. I invite you to sign it and share it with your networks!

At the Council meeting, several countries shared our concerns. France highlighted the need to talk about copyright, Malta talked about the need to foster cultural diversity and promoting artistic expression. The Latvian Minister mentioned Gints Zilbalodis' words when he won his Oscar for his film 'Flow': "We are all in the same boat". Estonia also stressed the need to secure fair remuneration and regulate copyright so that innovation does not come at the expenses of creative individuals. Germany talked about protecting copyright and the creative sector from being exploited by AI. So did Czech Republic, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Italy. Slovenia spoke about AI models being developed without authors’ consent. Denmark, the next EU Presidency country, promised that fair remuneration for rightsholders would be a top priority. 

I'm sharing this to let you know (and remind myself) that there's support among politicians to safeguard culture and authors' rights. Sure, the Culture Ministers have a tough job to convince their colleagues in charge of the Economy or Tech back in the capital, but they are on the same page with fellow ministers responsible for culture and copyright - they agree that more must be done!   

Cannes Film Festival

The same energy to defend European cinema and promote cultural diversity was visible at the Cannes Film Festival in the events I attended:

• The European Parliament’s Lux Audience Award event: Invest in what matters, support to European film and Audiovisual sectors in the next MFF, with the participation (among others) of MEPs Emma Rafowicz and Laurence Farreng;
• The SACD/CNC debate on the 20^th anniversary of the UNESCO convention on cultural diversity, with the participation (among others) of Costa-Gavras (SAA Patron), Audrey Azoulay, Director General of UNESCO and Stéphane Séjourné, Executive Vice-President for Prosperity and Industrial Strategy of the European Commission, followed by a strong speech by the French Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati;
• The EFAD conference on the European model of cinema, celebrating the 10^th anniversary of the organisation with (among others) Alain Berset, Secretary General of Council of Europe and Glenn Micallef, Commissioner for Integenerational Fairness, Fairness, Youth, Culture and Sport.

I was also lucky to see six films in my four days in Cannes! My favourite was The Little Sister by Hafsia Herzi and I also enjoyed very much The Phoenician Scheme by Wes Anderson.

The EU Parliament’s work on AI

There's some interesting work going on in the EU Parliament that echoes the concerns of the Culture Ministers. The European Parliament's Legal Affairs committee is preparing an own initiative report on AI and Copyright. The rapporteur is MEP Axel Voss (EPP/DE). He was the rapporteur for the Copyright directive in the digital single market adopted in 2019. Earlier this month, he held the first online stakeholder consultation, one which the SAA participated in. I am now preparing the SAA's contribution to a workshop, organised by the Committee on 4 June, to which we have been invited.

On 20 May, the Culture committee held a hearing on "Empowering creators in the age of AI", which my colleague Annica and I attended. (You can watch it here, starting at 16:39). In addition to Björn Ulvaeus, ABBA co-founder and President of CISAC, who made it clear that AI cannot be built on the theft of works, there was also an interesting presentation by Prof. Alexandra Bensamoun. She spoke about how tech companies need quality data - copyright works - otherwise the models will degenerate with only synthetic data. She argued that the solution for creators' remuneration was therefore transparency and negotiated licences. Another interesting speaker was Ivona Tautkute-Rustecka, an artist and a machine learning engineer. She trained her own AI model with her own dataset and her art includes programmed code so that the neural networks forget, as humans do.  

Let's not forget that although the cultural and creative sectors are diverse and our solutions may differ, we are united by our shared concerns. It's a good thing that Culture Ministers, MEPs, and sector representatives are all speaking up. Now, we just need to continue until we're heard!

We are actively discussing with our members to understand their specific challenges and solutions needed to the AI issue. We are also trying to anticipate what the EU Commission's next move will be, considering the delayed final draft of the EU AI Act's Code of Practice. As we know, stakeholders and industries are pulling in different directions. Stay tuned...

Best regards,

Cécile