A German court ruled Tuesday that OpenAI has infringed copyright law by using song lyrics to feed its chat models in a case that could have wide implications for European artists.
The Munich court found that the maker of ChatGPT was not entitled to use song lyrics to train its artificial intelligence without licenses and that the artists who wrote them are entitled to compensation.
“Both the memorization in the language models and the reproduction of the song lyrics in the chatbot’s outputs constitute infringements of copyright law,” the court ruled.
The case was filed in November 2024 by German music rights body GEMA on behalf of the artists behind nine German songs.
GEMA, which represents more than 100,000 composers, songwriters, and publishers, accused OpenAI of reproducing protected song lyrics without having purchased licenses or paid the creators.
San Francisco-based OpenAI argued it had not broken the law because its language models do not store or copy specific data but rather reflect in their settings what they have learnt, according to the court.
With regard to the AI chatbot, it is users who are the producers of its output and are responsible for it, OpenAI argued.
But the court on Tuesday ruled that the plaintiffs were entitled to compensation “both on the basis of the reproduction of the texts in the language models and their reproduction in the outputs”.
In a statement on Tuesday, OpenAI said that “we disagree” with the ruling and that the company was “considering next steps.”
“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,” it said.
“We respect the rights of creators and content owners and are having productive conversations with many organizations around the world so that they can also benefit from the opportunities of this technology.”
