AI And The Redefinition Of Law In Code: The Future Of Legal Intention Under Article 4 DSM

• Published date: 23 December 2025
• Subject Matter: Intellectual Property, Technology, Copyright, New Technology
• Law Firm: GTG
• Author: Dr. Ian Gauci

DSM Copyright Directive

Across Europe, rules once written for human readers are being interpreted by machines. This quiet transformation comes into view through Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790 on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM Copyright Directive).

The Article allows text and data mining where a user has lawful access, unless a rightholder has 'expressly reserved' that right 'in an appropriate manner'. What counts as 'appropriate' now reaches the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Like Company Kft v Google Ireland Ltd (C-250/25, reference lodged 3 April 2025) following a request from the Budapest K'rnyéki T'rvényszék (Budapest District Court), which asks how a rightholder can reserve rights effectively when artificial-intelligence models absorb vast quantities of online material, and how such reservations interact with reproduction and communication to the public under the Directive 2001/29/EC (the InfoSoc Directive).

In Germany, the Hamburg Regional Court confronted the question first in Robert Kneschke v LAION e.V. (27 Sept 2024). The claimant, a professional photographer, found his image inside the LAION 5B dataset, amongst billions of image-text pairs drawn from public URLs. The court held that the dataset's creation served research within ' 60d UrhG, implementing Article 3 of the DSM Copyright Directive, and dismissed the claim. Yet the judgment added that Article 4(3) of the DSM Copyright Directive does not require any particular technical form for reservations; a clear human-readable statement, visible and unambiguous, could suffice. The court called such a notice an Erkl'rung, which means a declaration of will, and thus a communicative act.

In the Netherlands, the Amsterdam District Court reached a different conclusion...