The background material compiles the knowledge base for AI recommendations and supports education providers and teachers in developing AI competence and utilizing AI locally.

The background material covers various themes and should be used as a whole.

The Copyright Act (including the provisions concerning education) also applies to the educational use of AI applications. The use of AI in education offers many possibilities, but there are also important copyright issues associated with it that require:

  • education providers:
    • to take into account copyright issues when procuring, deploying and managing AI applications and systems  
    • to provide instructions to staff and organise continuing education or induction, where necessary  
  • education staff:
    • to take the education provider's instructions into account in the planning and implementation of their work tasks.  

Copyright and terms of use: AI applications and AI-assisted outputs are subject to the same copyright regulations as other education activities. When procuring AI applications, the education provider should review the terms of use of the service in regard to whether the data entered into the service is used in the company's product development (as training data) and prepare the necessary guidelines for education and teaching staff accordingly. In education, it is preferable to use AI applications that do not use entered data in the service provider’s own product development. Some applications offer the option of preventing the use of entered data as training data, in which case it is important to do so before deployment.

Output generated by learners and staff: Works created by learners and staff that exceed the threshold of originality are protected by copyright and subject to the same rules as other works.

AI-assisted content: Content generated by AI is generally not protected by copyright because it does not meet the criteria for human creative work. The final content should be primarily created by humans and exceed the threshold of originality in order to obtain copyright protection.

Training AI: Using copyrighted works to train AI without the copyright holder’s permission is prohibited. Using an AI application does not automatically mean training the AI, but it is the responsibility of the education provider to assess this in connection with the procurement of AI applications. If learners train AI in the context of education, it is important to use only training data that is authorised by the copyright holder or that is outside the scope of copyright protection. Such materials include works that have been released for free public use, whose copyright protection period has expired (public domain) or that have been published under a licence that allows them to be used for training (e.g. MIT and applicable cc licences, such as CC0).

Openness and transparency: Content generated by AI that has not been altered by humans in any way should be clearly labelled as such so that users are aware of its origin, as AI content is generally not copyright-protected.

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