At the end of 2025, the international journal International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law (IIC) published an article by Dr Rita Matulionytė, Senior Researcher at the Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences, entitled “Reconceptualising the Reproduction Right in the Age of AI”.

Dr Matulionytė, who has been researching intellectual property law for many years, explains that the impetus for writing this article came from the growing outrage within creative communities caused by the training of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms on millions of creative works without authorisation from their creators.

The reproduction right is implicated at various stages of the AI development process, for example during the creation of training datasets, where at least transient technological copies are produced. However, experts fundamentally disagree on whether a trained AI model itself contains copies of the training data or their legal equivalents. The article argues that, although AI models may not create digital copies of training data as traditionally understood, the “ingestion” of works during the training process is functionally equivalent to the storage of those works within the model. Consequently, such data should fall within the scope of the reproduction right.

Dr Matulionytė concludes that the time has come to update the reproduction right by incorporating a new form of use of works, namely the “ingestion” of works into AI models during the AI training process. As such an expansion of the concept of the reproduction right would also affect the interests of other stakeholders—particularly the AI industry—it may be necessary to consider appropriate exceptions and limitations in order to ensure a fair balance between competing private and public interests.

The article is available in English here.