OpenAI Used Song Lyrics In Violation of Copyright Laws, German Court Says

A Munich court ruled that OpenAI violated German copyright law by training its models on lyrics from nine songs and allowing ChatGPT to reproduce them. OpenAI now faces damages as it considers an appeal. Reuters reports: 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. 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 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.

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