OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by Workaccount2 » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 3:28 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #212

terminalshort wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That interpretation is not correct. The owner explicitly denied license to the data and then the company went to a third party to gain access to the data that they were denied license to. > When building its tool, Ross sought to license Westlaw’s content as training data for its AI search engine. As the two are competitors, Thomson Reuters refused. Instead, Ross hired a third party, LegalEase, to provide training dat…

You’re contradicting the conclusion / interpretation written on dglaw.com? What is incorrect, exactly? It doesn’t seem like your summary challenges either my comment or the article I linked to, it’s not clear what you’re arguing. The court did find in this case that the use of the unlicensed data used for AI training was not fair use.

The case isn't on LLMs or transformers, it's on using some other form of non generative AI to create an index of case law. The details are light, but I would guess that the "AI" was just copying over the data from Thomson Reuters.

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

#242

Post by freejazz » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 3:42 PM UTC

shagie wrote: post #226

freejazz wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 authority, but no one is obligated to follow that. Do you have some sort of different understanding of copyright law where it's legal…

> Do you have some sort of different understanding of copyright law where it's legal to commercially use lyrics (verbatim, mind you) without a license? Some places have a concept of de minimus as applied to copyright. It is often not prosecuted to have an acoustic guitar and an open case and play music on a park bench. You may need a license for busking in some places - but that's not tied to the music that you play…

De minimus is when you only use a small portion of the lyrics, so it is not considered infringement.

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

#243

Post by verzali » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 4:03 PM UTC

ajuc wrote: post #235

fosk wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably fear a domino effect if they let go of this. And so they defend it vehemently to avoid setting a precedent. Think about compositions, samples, performance rights, and so on. There is a lot more at stake.

What's the benefit of protecting monetary IP rights to art? We'll only get the art that artists really wanted to make? Great!

What's the benefit of getting paid for your work? We'll only get the work people really want to do? Great!

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

#244

Post by ajuc » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 5:59 PM UTC

verzali wrote: post #243

ajuc wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the benefit of protecting monetary IP rights to art? We'll only get the art that artists really wanted to make? Great!

What's the benefit of getting paid for your work? We'll only get the work people really want to do? Great!

Art existed before IP rights. Artists did get paid.

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

#245

Post by vkou » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 6:51 PM UTC

ajuc wrote: post #235

fosk wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably fear a domino effect if they let go of this. And so they defend it vehemently to avoid setting a precedent. Think about compositions, samples, performance rights, and so on. There is a lot more at stake.

What's the benefit of protecting monetary IP rights to art? We'll only get the art that artists really wanted to make? Great!

> What's the benefit of protecting monetary IP rights to art?

What's the benefit of protecting monetary IP rights to software?

What's the benefit of consolidating all meaningful access to computing services to a few trillion-dollar gate-keeping corpos?

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

#246

Post by thedevilslawyer » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 11:47 PM UTC

delaminator wrote: post #184

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an absolutely good tradeoff. There's no longer any need for copyright. Patents should go next. Only trademarks can stay.

> There's no longer any need for copyright So you assign zero value to the process of creation? Zero value to the process of production? So people who write and produce books, shows and films should all do what? Give up their craft?

Creation isn't special, or constrained in number.

Process of creation itself is gratifying and valuable to those who will pursue it. No reason to additionally reward it.

Lamp lighters had to give up their craft I suppose and made way to a better world.

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

#247

Post by thedevilslawyer » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 11:49 PM UTC

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #190

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an absolutely good tradeoff. There's no longer any need for copyright. Patents should go next. Only trademarks can stay.

Bullshit. Read up and understand the history of these things and their benefits to society. There is a reason they were created in the first place. Over a very long time. With lots of thoughts into the tradeoff/benefits to society. That Disney fucked with it does not make the original tradeoff not a benefit to society.

The fact that you don't actually call out the specific benefit is telling. We're in a world of plenty and don't need copyright to have those benefits for our fellow humans.

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

#248

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 5:22 AM UTC

vkou wrote: post #245

ajuc wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the benefit of protecting monetary IP rights to art? We'll only get the art that artists really wanted to make? Great!

> What's the benefit of protecting monetary IP rights to art? What's the benefit of protecting monetary IP rights to software? What's the benefit of consolidating all meaningful access to computing services to a few trillion-dollar gate-keeping corpos?

[deleted]

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

#249

Post by llbbdd » Fri, Nov 14, 2025, 4:27 AM UTC

moontear wrote: post #237

llbbdd wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is largely how it works for nearly all coprightable work. I can draw Mickey Mouse but legally I'm not doing anything wrong until I try to sell it. It certainly doesn't put Crayola or Adobe at legal risk for me to do so.

But you are not the one drawing Mickey Mouse in this scenario, are you? You are instructing the AI company to draw something or more close to the original post you are prompting to generate lyrics for song X. Your prompt may be asking something for illegal (i.e. reproducing the lyrics), but the one reproducing the lyrics is the AI company, not you yourself. In your example you are asking Adobe to draw Mickey Mouse an…

This keeps coming up, and I am not a lawyer, but as far as I can tell none of that matters. I can pay someone to draw Mickey Mouse for me and hang it up in my house. If I invite people to visit my Mickey Mouse House and charge them for the privilege, I'm in violation. Maybe the artist I paid to draw the mouse is also in some smaller violation but it all comes back to distribution and impact. I don't think it devalues Mickey Mouse in any way if I have a slot machine that spits out pictures of Mickey Mouse. If it does devalue it, maybe it doesn't have much value to begin with.

Reproduction (again, IANAL) seems to consist of a lot more than "I made it", it consists of how you use it and whether that usage constitutes infringement.

EDIT: To add, genuine question, what does "asking" come down to? I can ask Photoshop to draw Mickey Mouse through a series of clever Mickey-Mouse-shaped brush strokes. I can ask Microsoft Word to reproduce lyrics by typing them in. At what gradient between those actions and text prompting am I (or OpenAI, or Adobe) committing copyright infringement?

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

#250

Post by llbbdd » Fri, Nov 14, 2025, 4:35 AM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #214

llbbdd wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is largely how it works for nearly all coprightable work. I can draw Mickey Mouse but legally I'm not doing anything wrong until I try to sell it. It certainly doesn't put Crayola or Adobe at legal risk for me to do so.

Not really, if I ask an artist to draw me a Mickey Mouse (for money) who is committing copyright infringement? It's an interesting observation that the big AI corps very much argue that learning "is the same that humans do", so fair use. But then when it comes to using that learning they argue the other way, i.e. "this is just a machine, it's the person asking who is doing the infringement".

Companies care about material damages in practice. I'm not a lawyer but my understanding is that in that case, the artist drawing and selling the work is infringing (to a degree, because this seems to be a case Disney et al doesn't care about) but that if you take their work and publish and promote it and sell it, YOU become Disney's problem. If the wind and rain and erosion and time and God managed to produce a perfect post-Steamboat-Willie Mickey Mouse in the desert sand, visible from space, that wouldn't be infringement until you monetized it, called it Mickey Mouse and charged people to see it. A lot of the entities trying to get their piece of Infringement Pie seem to think their authority and their works are in the first position here instead; that my newfound capability to generate a Mickey Mouse from scratch on a whim affects their pockets, when in fact we're back to a variant of the classic piracy argument - I was not ever going to pay for it under any condition. If I decide this weekend to have one of the robots help me publish To Kill a Mockingbird Part 2, then sue me into the ground.