When culture becomes AI infrastructure: copyright and the emergence of chokepoint capitalism in Europe

Lawful cultural extraction may leave chokepoints intact while making them harder to see. This article examines that risk in European Union copyright and AI governance. Combining doctrinal legal analysis with legal political economy, it applies Giblin and Doctorow’s account of chokepoint capitalism to cultural inputs and AI-generated outputs, distinguishing barriers, practical dependency, intermediary control and capture. The analysis identifies how rights reservations, licensing and transparency duties may protect cultural interests while leaving authors, performers, cultural heritage institutions and communities dependent on intermediaries for access, representation and remuneration. It proposes interoperability and portability, collective representation and remuneration, contractual safeguards, public or cooperative infrastructure, platform accountability and cultural contestability. These measures are assessed for their capacity to reduce dependency and their potential to create new intermediaries whose authority cannot readily be challenged. The article concludes that cultural accountability requires attention to the practical conditions for exercising rights and participating in decisions about culture.