This is the first of its kind in Europe and is a hope for artists in the face of artificial intelligence. A German court ruled on Tuesday, November 11, that American giant OpenAI had violated the copyrights of German musicians, and ruled in favor of Echo, which stated that the company represents around 100,000 players in the music industry in Germany.
The company filed a complaint in November 2024, accusing OpenAI of using song lyrics to train its AI models and then returning them to users, without a license or compensation from the creators.
The Munich court decided that “linguistic model” used by OpenAI as well “reproduction of song texts in chatbot results” formed “violation of exploitation rights protected by copyright”, he explained in a press release.
The trial is the first in Europe, according to the Echo, which refuses to allow human work to serve as free raw material for the artificial intelligence giant, and for whom. “creator’s livelihood” at stake. Organizational demands “found, both due to the reproduction of the text in the linguistic model and its reproduction in the results”, considering the court.
On the first point, “indirect perception” of this work is “sufficient to constitute reproduction”, considers a court that bases itself on the case law of the Court of the European Union (CJEU). And in response, the chat robot ChatGPT has it “Making the lyrics of the disputed songs accessible to the public in an unauthorized manner.”
The decision concerns song texts by nine famous German authors. OpenAI has rejected the accusations, arguing that its models do not store individual data but rather “reflects what they learned based on the training data set.”
OpenAI itself expressed its response “contradictory” with the decision of the Munich court, emphasizing that the decision only concerns the texts that appeared in the complaint of the copyright management organization, Gema. “We are studying possible next steps”said a spokesman for the American company.
OpenAI, whose ChatGPT claims about 700 million weekly users, is considered one of the world leaders in artificial intelligence. These giants’ control over musical and literary works is often criticized by industry players, who demand stronger regulation, in particular through European legislation (the AI Act), to gain transparency over the data used and guarantee their revenues.
