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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

#251

Post by hulitu »

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.

You can always vote, but there is always someone going through the back door paying politicians and judges.

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

#252

Post by hulitu »

admaiora wrote: post #135
miltonlost wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And it's a question of do we accept breaking law for the possibility to have the greatest technological advancement of the 21st century. In my opinion, legal system has become a blocker for a lot of innovation, not only in AI but elsewhere as well.

> And it's a question of do we accept breaking law for the possibility to have the greatest technological advancement of the 21st century

You mean like, murder ?

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

#253

Post by knollimar »

dathinab wrote: post #240
knollimar wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a really broad interpretation of "technically memorization" that could have unintended side effects (like say banning equations that could be used to generate specific lyrics), but I suppose some countries consider loading into RAM a copy already. I guess we're already at absurdity

It _really_ isn't absurd. The law doesn't care what technical trickery you use to encode/compress copyrighted material. If you take data and then create a equation which contains it based on it it which can reproduce the data trivially then yes, IMHO obviously, this form of embedding copyrighted data still is embedding copyrighted data. Think about it if that weren't the case I could just transform a video into an eq…

In regards to "Because the RNG wasn't written "based on" the copy righted content."

Does that mean I can distribute the seed if I find one and this RNG wasn't trained on that content?

Does it prevent me from sharing that number on the internet?

It seems like theres a lot of subjective intent here that I'm extremely skeptical

For an LLM also:

If it's lossy enough that it needs RAG to fix the results is that okay?

-------------------

In my opinion I think actually getting the output is where the infringement happens. Having and distributing the LLM weights shouldn't be infringment (in my head) because of the enforcability of results. Otherwise you risk banning RNGs or them all being forced to prove they didn't train on copyrighted content

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

#254

Post by moontear »

llbbdd wrote: post #249
moontear wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Now I get where you are coming from (also not a lawyer):

- You asking the painter to create a Mickey Mouse painting: not illegal. You still are asking for a derivative work without permission, but if used privately you're good (this is different per jurisdiction) - The artist creating the painting of a derivative work is acting illegally - they are selling you the picture and hence this is a commercial act and trademark infringement - Displaying the bought Mickey Mouse image publicly is likely infringement, but worse is if you would charge admission to show the picture, that would definitely be illegal - If you were to hide the image in your basement and look at it privately, it would most likely not be illegal (private use - but see first point since this is different per jurisdiction)

Comparing violations doesn't really make sense (the artist creating it vs. you displaying it) - the act of creating the image for money is illegal. If it were the artist creating the image for him/herself - that would be fine.

Now getting back to the LLM and your question which also the court answered (jurisdiction: Germany). The courts opinion is that the AI recreating these lyrics by itself is illegal (think about the artist creating the image for you for money).

Personally I would think the key part and similarity is the payment. You pay for using OpenAI. You pay for it creating those lyrics/texts. In my head I can create a similar reasoning to your Mickey Mouse example. If we'd take open source LLMs and THEY would create perfect lyrics, I think the court would have a much harder case to make. Who would you be suing and for what kind of money? It would all be open source and nobody is paying anyone anything to recreate the lyrics. It would be and is very hard to prove that the LLMs were trained on copyrighted material - in the lyrics example, they may have ingested illegal lyrics-sharing sites, but they may also just have ingested Twitter or Reddit where people talk about the lyrics - how could any LLM know that these contents were illegal or not to be ingested.

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

#255

Post by dathinab »

knollimar wrote: post #253
dathinab wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It _really_ isn't absurd. The law doesn't care what technical trickery you use to encode/compress copyrighted material. If you take data and then create a equation which contains it based on it it which can reproduce the data trivially then yes, IMHO obviously, this form of embedding copyrighted data still is embedding copyrighted data. Think about it if that weren't the case I could just transform a video into an eq…

In regards to "Because the RNG wasn't written "based on" the copy righted content." Does that mean I can distribute the seed if I find one and this RNG wasn't trained on that content? Does it prevent me from sharing that number on the internet? It seems like theres a lot of subjective intent here that I'm extremely skeptical For an LLM also: If it's lossy enough that it needs RAG to fix the results is that okay? ----…

> If it's lossy enough that it needs RAG to fix the results is that okay?

but then the only way RAG can "fix" the result is if the RAG system stored the song text in it's vector data base

in which case the law case and solutions to fix the issue are much more clear

in a certain way a a LLM which only encodes language but now knowledge and then uses RAG and similar is the most desirable (not just for copyright reasons but also e.g. update-ability, traceability, remove-ability of misinformation etc.)

sadly AFIK it doesn't work as language and knowledge details are too much interleaved

> Does that mean I can distribute the seed if I find one and this RNG wasn't trained on that content?

honestly I think this falls outside of situations copyright law considers. But also if you consider that copyright law mostly doesn't care about technical implementation details and that the "spirit of law" (intent of law maker) matters if unclear cases I think I also have a best guess answer:

Neither the RNG nor the seed by them self are a copyright violation but if you spread them with the intend to spread non licensed copy you still do a copyright violation and in that context the seed might be idk. taken down from sharing sites even if by itself it isn't a copyright violation.

The thing is in the end you can transform _any_ digital content into

- "just a number"

- or "just a equation", "equation system" etc.

- or an image, matrix, graph, human readable text , or pretty much anything

so fundamentally you can't have a clean cut between what can and can't be a copyright violation

which is why it matters so much that law acts on a higher abstraction level then what exactly technical happens.

And why intent of law (in gray area cases) matters so much.

And why law really shouldn't be a declarative definition of strict mathematics rules.

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

#256

Post by delaminator »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #246
delaminator wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Creation isn't special, or constrained in number. > Process of creation itself is gratifying and valuable to those who will pursue it.

spoken like someone who has never made anything in the real world

Holding a boom mic in the air is not gratifying and valuable to anyone who has to do it.

The fruits of your labour are not your labour.

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