OpenAI used song lyrics in violation of copyright laws, German court says

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By Jörn Poltz and Friederike Heine

MUNICH (Reuters) -OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT violated German copyright laws by reproducing lyrics from songs by best-selling musician Herbert Groenemeyer and others, a court ruled on Tuesday, in a closely watched case against the U.S. firm over its use of lyrics to train its language models.

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.

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.

COPYRIGHT INFRINGED

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.

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 memorisation 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.

POTENTIAL PRECEDENT

The outcome of the case could set a precedent in Europe for how AI companies use copyrighted materials.

“The internet is not a self-service store, and human creative achievements are not free templates,” said GEMA CEO Tobias Holzmueller. “Today, we have set a precedent that protects and clarifies the rights of authors: even operators of AI tools such as ChatGPT must comply with copyright law.”

The decision can be appealed.

“We disagree with the ruling and are considering next steps,” a spokesperson for OpenAI said. “The decision is for a limited set of lyrics and does not impact the millions of people, businesses and developers in Germany that use our technology every day.”

Earlier this year, leading Bollywood music labels asked a New Delhi court to join a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI over alleged unauthorised use of sound recordings to train AI models, underscoring global concerns about AI and music rights.

(Reporting by Joern Poltz, Writing by Friederike Heine; Editing by Madeline Chambers and Susan Fenton)