Music rights group scores landmark legal victory in copyright battle with OpenAI
Composer tells Charting court's ruling is 'the best outcome we could have hoped for'
WHAT’S HAPPENED?
CREATORS ARE celebrating after a court in Germany ruled that ChatGPT violates European copyright laws by reproducing lyrics used to train OpenAI’s generative models. In a landmark decision Munich’s regional court sided with German collecting society GEMA which had claimed ChatGPT’s reproduced lyrics amounted to copyright infringement, and that OpenAI needed a licence.
In this Quick Take we explain the background to the momentous ruling and why the court came down in favour of GEMA, which manages the rights of more than 100,000 composers, lyricists and music publishers. We have reactions from GEMA and a leading German composer, OpenAI’s response, and pithy analysis.
BACKGROUND
Last November GEMA became the first organisation of its kind to file a lawsuit against a gen AI developer. GEMA accused OpenAI of “reproducing protected song lyrics by German authors without having acquired licences or paying the authors in question”. Filed in Munich’s specialised 42nd Civil Chamber the lawsuit also claimed that original song lyrics had been used to train ChatGPT without a licence. GEMA made clear that the lawsuit was a test case “to clarify numerous legal issues”. Among them was the opt-out given to Europe’s creators under the bloc’s text and data mining (TDM) copyright exception, which was extended to AI under the EU AI Act. GEMA exercised that opt-out on behalf of rightsholders as it sought to establish a licensing model it had developed two months earlier (see Charting #29).
In September this year a panel of three judges hinted heavily it was likely to side with GEMA. OpenAI was reportedly left with no option other than to discuss licensing with GEMA, or risk sanctions for further unauthorised reproductions (Charting #74). Among the songs cited as evidence of OpenAI’s unauthorised violations were Männer by Herbert Grönemeyer and Atemlos by Kristina Bach.
