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OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules

reuters.com

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Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules

#121

Post by freejazz »

tremon wrote: post #89
embedding-shape wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More EU countries are going to follow and reach the same conclusion, especially now that Germany has set a legal precedence. That's not how laws and regulations work in European or even EU countries. Courts/the legal system in Germany can not set legal precedents for other countries, and countries don't use legal precedents from other countries, as they obviously have different laws. It could be cited as an authori…

countries don't use legal precedents from other countries, as they obviously have different laws The seminal authority for all copyright laws, the Berne Convention, is ratified by 181 countries. Its latest revisions are TRIPS (concerning authorship of music recordings) and the WIPO Copyright Treaty (concerning digital publication), both of which are ratified by the European Union as a whole. It's not directly obvious…

US copyright law originates in the constitution and the US does not follow a number of elements of the Berne convention, such as moral rights.

Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules

#122

Post by freejazz »

Myrmornis wrote: post #57
barrucadu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t think a country’s government can justify no commercial LLMs to its populace They're not saying no LLMs, they're saying no LLMs using lyrics without a license. OpenAI simply need to pay for a license, or train an LLM without using lyrics.

But lyrics are just one example. Are you saying that training experiments must filter out all substrings from the training input that bear too close a resemblance to a substring of a copyrighted work?

At some point, use of the lyrics becomes de minimis

Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules

#123

Post by nba456_ »

Sol- wrote: post #111

I think in the end they will just pay off copyright holders. The German GEMA is mostly interested in rent-seeking through whatever means available, it's basically the whole point of the organization. They'll easily be paid off once all legal avenues are exhausted for OpenAI. Though they'll of course keep fighting in court in the hopes of some more favorable negotiating position.

If the copyright costs get too high then we'll just use Chinese AI, unless they try to ban that, too.

Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules

#124

Post by akersten »

barrucadu wrote: post #27
petesergeant wrote: post #11

I am curious what happens if they call their bluff on this and cut off ChatGPT in Germany. Not that I think OpenAI is doing the right thing, just, I don’t think a country’s government can justify no commercial LLMs to its populace.

> I don’t think a country’s government can justify no commercial LLMs to its populace They're not saying no LLMs, they're saying no LLMs using lyrics without a license. OpenAI simply need to pay for a license, or train an LLM without using lyrics.

Oi, you got a loisense to read those words and then repeat them back to me when asked?

Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules

#125

Post by griffzhowl »

griffzhowl wrote: post #114
EdgeExplorer wrote: post #103

The obsession with protecting access to lyrics is one of the strangest long-running legal battles to me. I will skip tracks on Spotify sometimes specifically because there are no lyrics available. Easy access to lyrics is practically an advertisement for the music. Why do record companies not want lyrics freely available? In most cases, it means they aren't available at all. How is that a good business decision?

I think having the lyrics reproducible in text form isn't the problem. Many sites have been doing that for decades and as far as I know record companies haven't gone after them. But these days with generative AI, they can take lyrics and just make a new song with them, and you can probably see why artists and record companies would want to stop that. Plus, from TFA, "GEMA hoped discussions could now take place with O…

Had a couple of drive-by downvotes... Is it that stupid an opinion? Granted I know nothing about the case except for what's in TFA

Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules

#126

Post by mock-possum »

miltonlost wrote: post #112
loudmax wrote: post #68

Simon Willison had an analysis of Claude's system prompt back in May. One of the things that stood out was the effort they put in to avoiding copyright infringement: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/25/claude-4-system-prompt... Everyone knows that these LLMs were trained on copyrighted material, and as a next-token prediction model, LLMs are strongly inclined to reproduce text they were trained on.

All AI companies know they're breaking the law. They all have prompts effectively saying "Don't show that we broke the law!". That we continue to have tech companies consistently breaking the law and nothing happens is an indictment of our current economy.

I don’t read this as “don’t show we broke the law,” I read it as “don’t give the user the false impression that there’s any legal issue with this generated content.”

There’s nothing law breaking about quoting publicly available information. Google isn’t breaking the law when it displays previews of indexed content returned by the search algorithm, and that’s clearly the approach being taken here.

Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules

#127

Post by Levitz »

JCM9 wrote: post #9

With AI slop showing up everywhere, there’s a real danger that folks will just no longer be motivated to produce real original content. With all major models not basically trained on nearly all available data, beyond the financial AI bubble about to burst there’s also a big content bubble that’s about exhausted as folks are just pumping out slop vs producing original creative human output. That may be the ultimate lo…

It is of no cost to me when someone else writes a book, plays a song or draws a picture. It is also true that, basically whatever I ever do, someone else has done better. This does not stop me from doing those things because the value within them is in doing them.

We have cars, buses and planes, yet people do partake in pilgrimages. The process matters, even if only personally.

Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules

#128

Post by mock-possum »

HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #47
riazrizvi wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI slop is like 90’s websites and desktop publishing - there’s a novelty for AI-newbie-creators driving them to churn out lazy crap, while being oblivious to how it lands with strangers. Tastes will mature, society will more vocally mock this crap, and we’ll stop seeing the sloppier stuff come out of reputable locations.

You assume that the public recognizes AI slop for what it is. Across platforms now, people are readily engaging with blatant AI text posts and generated images as if they are bona-fide. In fact, if you point out that the poster is a bot, you may well well get some flack from the community.

People are already upset over that ‘walk my walk’ song on the country music charts

Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules

#129

Post by barrucadu »

akersten wrote: post #124
barrucadu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t think a country’s government can justify no commercial LLMs to its populace They're not saying no LLMs, they're saying no LLMs using lyrics without a license. OpenAI simply need to pay for a license, or train an LLM without using lyrics.

Oi, you got a loisense to read those words and then repeat them back to me when asked?

I take it you think copyright shouldn't exist at all, then?

Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules

#130

Post by mock-possum »

JCM9 wrote: post #9

With AI slop showing up everywhere, there’s a real danger that folks will just no longer be motivated to produce real original content. With all major models not basically trained on nearly all available data, beyond the financial AI bubble about to burst there’s also a big content bubble that’s about exhausted as folks are just pumping out slop vs producing original creative human output. That may be the ultimate lo…

> folks will just no longer be motivated to produce real original content.

Honestly if your only motivation for creating art was “computers can’t do what I do” then… I don’t want to be too gatekeepy about it, but that doesn’t sound like you’re a ‘real’ artist to me. Real artists create art because they enjoy doing it, not because it’s the exclusive domain of humans.

You don’t need to be special, you don’t need to be the best, you don’t need to even be good or successful or recognized or appreciated (although of course all those things are nice) - you just have to be creating art.

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