France's Darcos bill: 227 rights groups press lawmakers to make AI firms prove they didn't train on copyrighted music

A coalition of 227 rights organizations called on France’s National Assembly on June 8, 2026 to pass the Darcos bill, which would force AI companies to prove they did not train their systems on copyrighted work. The groups are all members of CISAC, and their statement was published by French collecting society SACEM around CISAC’s centenary General Assembly in Paris.

What the Darcos bill would change for AI companies

The bill, named after Senator Laure Darcos, would insert a presumption into the French Intellectual Property Code that AI providers have used copyrighted works, unless they can prove otherwise. That reverses the burden of proof. Today a creator has to show their work trained a model. Under the Darcos bill, the AI company has to show it didn’t.

The French Senate passed the bill unanimously in April, and France’s Council of State cleared it in March as compatible with the French Constitution and EU law. The lower house has not scheduled it for debate, and it was left off the June agenda. Last month, 81 French cultural and media organizations made a similar call for lawmakers to put it on the calendar.

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The large-scale use of our works to train AI systems, without authorization or compensation, constitutes the greatest plundering of creative and artistic works ever perpetrated.

Why the Darcos bill comes down to proof, not principle

The fight here is about proof, not principle. Most rights holders already believe their catalogs were scraped. The problem has always been showing it in court, because the training data sits inside the AI company. A burden-shift hands that problem back to the people who built the models. The timing lines up with the broader push around CISAC’s Paris Commitment, which asked governments to protect human creators in the AI era.

For working songwriters and composers, this is the difference between a right you hold on paper and one you can enforce. A licensing market only works when the unlicensed path carries real legal risk.