**German Court Rules OpenAI Violated Copyright Law Through ChatGPT**
A German court has found OpenAI in violation of copyright law due to its ChatGPT chatbot program. The ruling centers on OpenAI’s generative AI services illegally reproducing the lyrics of several popular German artists in its content.
The case, reported by Reuters following a ruling earlier this week, was brought forward by the German music rights society GEMA. GEMA represented numerous musicians whose work was used without permission to train OpenAI’s ChatGPT language models.
Among the artists affected was best-selling musician Herbert Groenemeyer. His singles “Maenner” and “Bochum” were reportedly among nine songs included in the lawsuit. Judge Elke Schwager ultimately ruled in favor of GEMA, determining that OpenAI’s use of copyrighted material without consent constituted infringement.
As a result, OpenAI has been ordered to pay damages to the copyright holders. However, the final amount of the damages remains undisclosed.
This legal decision adds to the ongoing challenges faced by OpenAI concerning its generative AI services. Previously, the company’s Sora 2 video generation tool attracted multiple complaints and potential lawsuits from organizations such as the Motion Picture Association, SAG-AFTRA, and Japan’s CODA group.
In its defense during this recent case, OpenAI argued that its language models do not store training data directly but may reflect similar materials in their post-training outputs. The court, however, concluded that the generated outputs were too closely aligned with the copyrighted works, thereby constituting copyright infringement.
This ruling underscores the growing legal scrutiny around the use of copyrighted content in training AI systems and highlights the challenges companies face in navigating intellectual property laws in the age of generative AI.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/146798/openai-chatgpt-german-music-copyright-lawsuit
