OpenAI Used Song Lyrics In Violation of Copyright Laws, German Court Says (reuters.com)
- Reference: 0180050608
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/11/11/2124206/openai-used-song-lyrics-in-violation-of-copyright-laws-german-court-says
- Source link: https://www.reuters.com/world/german-court-sides-with-plaintiff-copyright-case-against-openai-2025-11-11/
> The regional court in Munich found that the company trained its AI on protected content from nine German songs, including Groenemeyer's hits "Maenner" and "Bochum." The case was brought by German music rights society GEMA, whose members include composers, lyricists and publishers, in another sign of artists around the world fighting back against data scraping by AI.
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> Presiding judge Elke Schwager ordered OpenAI to pay damages for the use of copyrighted material, without disclosing a figure. GEMA legal advisor Kai Welp said GEMA hoped discussions could now take place with OpenAI on how copyright holders can be remunerated. OpenAI had argued that its language models did not store or copy specific training data but, rather, reflected what they had learned based on the entire training data set.
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> Since the output would only be generated as a result of user inputs known as prompts, it was not the defendants, but the respective user who would be liable for it, OpenAI had argued. However, the court found that both the memorization in the language models and the reproduction of the song lyrics in the chatbot's outputs constitute infringements of copyright exploitation rights, according to a statement on the ruling.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/german-court-sides-with-plaintiff-copyright-case-against-openai-2025-11-11/
At least they are consistent (Score:2)
Not that I agree with the ruling, but the music mafia would likely also go after a human who happens to have memorized the lyrics.
OpenAI saying it's the user who caused the violation is equally wacky.
A proper ruling would argue that it's not a copy until the original lyrics are reproduced in its output. Technically, the encoded text made its way in some lossy form into the model, but it's not really there either. These are copyrights, not patents. Being inspired by ideas is not a copyright violation. Ac
Re: (Score:2)
> A proper ruling would argue that it's not a copy until the original lyrics are reproduced in its output.
Imagine the lawsuits if upon the question "What is the text of Grönemeyer's 'Bochum'?" the machine would respond with a somewhat distorted/modified version of the actual text. I guess the only thing satisfying the media Mafia would be if all bots had to respond to any questions regarding media Mafia content with "I cannot tell you, but you can buy a license at ...link...."
Use the existing rules. (Score:2)
Hearing a song is not copyright infringement.
Memorizing lyrics is not copyright infringement.
Reproducing a song as a professional service definitely IS copyright infringement. An interesting question is whether the AI even knew it matched the lyrics. It might have had to do an 'after the fact' search with a 'plagiarism detector' to say, "oops, I guess that matches someone else.)
Blaming the prompts doesn't float, because that's basically saying "He asked me nicely."
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I think I'd find out if the algori
Also (Score:2)
You can Create AI apps with MongoDB
Re: (Score:2)
We could possibly create the future of AI copyright violation using prebuilt and customizable models.
The Gema is a pesky bunch. (Score:2)
They are the plaintiff in this case. They're still stuck in the steam age of media technology and royalty mechanisms. Rulings and concepts from the 50ies and 60ies. Super annoying. You don't want to get pissy with them because they have a de-facto government mandated monopoly on collecting royalties. Quasi a semi private semi official body for that exact purpose.
Conflicted (Score:2)
On the one hand, I think music copyright collectives can go a bit overboard (watch some of Rick Beato's YouTube videos where he talks about copyright abuse.)
On the other hand, anything that can damage the parasitic generative-AI industry makes me happy... so... yeah.
What damages? (Score:2)
I'd like to see how exactly these are determined and calculated.
Re: (Score:2)
Imagine the damage of only using a GPT to find out the lyrics of a song rather than the hundreds of free ad-supported web sites that also have the lyrics posted and aren't getting constantly battled in court.