OpenAI violated the copyright of German songs, a German court ruled on Tuesday. THAT “linguistic model » used by the American artificial intelligence (AI) giant as well “reproduction of song texts in chatbot results”is “violation of exploitation rights protected by copyright” decided the Munich court in a press release.
This decision, which concerns song texts from nine well-known German authors, follows a complaint filed in November 2024 by Gema, which stated that it represents around 100,000 performers in the music industry in Germany. The company criticized OpenAI for using song lyrics to train its AI models and then returning them to users, without a license or compensation from the authors.
First trial in Europe
The trial is the first in Europe, according to Echo, which refuses to allow human work to serve as free raw material for the AI giant, and for anyone else. “creator’s livelihood”at stake. Organizational demands “found, either due to the reproduction of the text in the linguistic model or its reproduction in the results” predicted the Munich court in its press release.
On the first point, “indirect perception”of this work is “sufficient to constitute reproduction”court estimates based on the case law of the Court of the European Union (CJEU). In response, the ChatGPT conversation robot “Making the lyrics of the disputed songs accessible to the public in an unauthorized manner”.
OpenAI rejected the allegations
OpenAI has rejected the accusations, arguing that its models do not store individual data but rather “reflect what they learned based on the training data set”.
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.
