Copyrights and AI

The following applies to the use of copyright-protected material on AI platforms. This ensures compliance with the Copyright Act and the agreements that UU has with publishers.

What happens to the rights when I upload something to an AI platform or tool?

• You do not transfer copyright. You grant the platform a license: a right of use. The scope of that right is set out in the tool’s terms and conditions.
• You may only grant a license for material for which the rights lie with you or the UU, and not for the work of a publisher or a colleague.
• The situation when uploading to an AI tool or a system such as Brightspace is essentially not different, unless the AI tool you are uploading to is not secure or, as a result, the uploaded material becomes more widely available than just to UU students and staff, or is used for purposes other than education.

Which tool?

• Prevent the reuse of uploaded material by carefully choosing which AI platform or tool you use. Bear in mind the principle that once you have uploaded something, you cannot fully retrieve or withdraw it. You should therefore only use AI platforms approved by UU. If you wish to have an AI tool approved, please use the allowlisting process.
• Safe AI tools provided by UU, such as EduGenAI and UU Chat, offer a private environment intended solely for educational purposes, where contracts have been concluded with the AI tool provider. You may upload copyright-protected material to these platforms unless it is explicitly stated that this is not permitted. 
• Other AI tools with your own private or free accounts: the terms and conditions often allow the provider to use your input to improve their service. Do not use material from publishers or personal data in these AI tools. Uploading copyright-protected material is therefore not permitted here, partly because, as UU, we have not entered into any agreements with these providers or carried out any AI compliance checks.

What am I allowed to upload to a safe AI platform or tool?

• Teaching materials developed in-house: yes. Do, however, remove students’ personal data (names, marks, traceable case studies).
• Material from colleagues: only with their consent.
• Material from publishers (chapters, articles, figures): do not upload to insecure tools or AI tools that have not been approved by UU. Instead, refer to the source via a link (DOI, library access, publisher’s portal). Even better: use open access or open educational resources.
• Never upload material that you have not obtained legally.

Educational exception and costs

• The educational exception (Section 16 of the Copyright Act) permits the use of extracts from a copyright-protected work for educational purposes, provided the source is cited – including the author’s name – and a fair remuneration is paid to the rights holder.
• UU pays this remuneration annually via the Easy Access scheme with the UvO Foundation. This covers short extracts: up to 40 pages from a work and a maximum of 20% of that work (both conditions apply simultaneously). For images: a maximum of 25 from the same work and a maximum of 10 by the same creator.
• Would you like to use more? Request permission in advance via the UvO portal; your faculty will cover the costs.
• Please note: this license applies to providing material to your own students within the learning environment. It does not grant permission for use in any other context.
• More information: stichting-uvo.nl/universiteit.

Notes for lecturers

• Make it clear to your students exactly what they are and are not allowed to upload. They are subject to the same rules.
• Use safe (UU-approved) AI tools. This prevents harm to the UU and those involved.

Copyright originates (throughout the European Union) only when a work is the result of the author’s own intellectual creation. The so-called anthropocentric requirement demands that it is a human who makes the creative choices necessary for copyright to come into existence. Thus, based on current EU copyright law, as GenAI-output lacks “human creativity”, there will be no copyright protection for results such as AI-generated lecture-slides, assessment questions or visuals. That might change when a human (you, for instance) makes changes to such output, as long as these changes in turn can be qualified as the author’s own intellectual creation. In such cases, it is either you, or (likely) the university, as your employer, who will hold the copyrights thereto.

In principle, all three can be considered to hold a degree of liability but what is important for you is that you have a duty of care to ensure that the output does not violate copyright of others.

Article 3 of the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM), and the national implementations thereof, research organisations such as the UU, are allowed to carry out text and data mining activities (TDM) for the purposes of scientific research, as long as they have lawful access to the (copyright or databases right protected) works used as input.

TDM is defined as “any automated analytical technique aimed at analysing text and data in digital form in order to generate information which includes but is not limited to patterns, trends and correlations” When these conditions are met, AI tools might be used. Thus, it is likely that subscription databases (to which the UU has lawful access) may be used with AI for research purposes. Besides Article 3, there is a broader exception under Article 4 DSM that allows TDM for any purpose, including commercial uses - but this applies only if the content you're mining hasn't been explicitly reserved by the copyright holder (an "opt-out"). Also, both exceptions require that you have lawful access to the material (e.g., via a library subscription or legitimate purchase), meaning you can’t just use freely available or pirated content.

In short, if you're using copyrighted content with an AI tool just to help you work or the study of your students, the TDM exceptions may not always allow you to feed copyright protected materials in an AI-tool. In those cases: always check the terms of use for the content and consider whether the rights holder allows such use.