A Munich Regional Court in Germany recently ruled that OpenAI, an American company, infringed copyright by using lyrics written by German musicians without authorization and should pay damages to the plaintiff, represented by a major German music copyright association.
According to CNMO, the case originated from a lawsuit filed in November 2024 by the German Association for the Performance and Reproduction of Music. This association is one of the largest collective management organizations for music copyrights in Europe, with members including approximately 100,000 lyricists, composers, and publishers, including renowned German musician Herbert Groenemeier.
Foreign media reports indicate that the association accused OpenAI of "systematically" using content from its copyrighted music library without permission or payment to train its AI model, ChatGPT, involving the lyrics of nine German songs, including Herbert Groenemeier's best-selling works. In response, OpenAI stated that the plaintiff misunderstood how ChatGPT works; its large language model does not store or copy specific data, but only reflects learned content, and the responsibility for generating content should lie with the user.
The court ruled that the memory behavior in OpenAI's language model and the reproduction of lyrics in ChatGPT output constituted copyright infringement. The ruling is appealable. An OpenAI spokesperson stated that the company disagrees with the ruling and is considering its options. The company also stated that the ruling "only involves a small number of lyrics" and does not affect the use of its technology by millions of individual and business users in Germany.
It is worth noting that a major Bollywood record company had previously filed for a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI in a New Delhi court, accusing it of unauthorized use of recordings when training its AI models.
