OpenAI used lyrics in violation of copyright laws: German court

MUNICH: 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 firm over its use of lyrics to train its language models. The regional court 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.

Presiding judge Elke Schwager ordered OpenAI to pay damages for the use of copyrighted material, without disclosing a figure.




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 users who would be liable, 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 right.

“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 who use our technology every day.”

REUTERS