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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

#61

Post by embedding-shape »

mrweasel wrote: post #52
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.

There are 80 million Germans. If you where OpenAI, or it's shareholders, would you leave that market open for a competitor? No, you'd make a version of your product without the lyrics. More EU countries are going to follow and reach the same conclusion, especially now that Germany has set a legal precedence. Should OpenAI just pull out of a market with 500 million people and leave it to Claude, Perplexity or someone…

> 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 authority, but no one is obligated to follow that.

What could happen for example, would be that EU law is interpreted through the CJEU (Court of Justice of the European Union), and its rulings bind EU member states, but that's outside of what individual countries do.

Sidenote, I'm not a English native speaker, but I think it's "precedent", not "precedence", similar words but the first one is specifically what I think you meant.

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

#62

Post by estebarb »

However, the lyrics are shown because the user requested them, shouldn't be the user be liable instead? The same way social networks are not liable for content uploaded by users? I think here there is a somewhat double standard.

Of course, maybe OpenAI et al should have get a license before training on the lyrics or to avoid training on copyrighted content. But the first would be expensive and the latter would require them to develop actual intelligence.

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

#63

Post by embedding-shape »

estebarb wrote: post #62

However, the lyrics are shown because the user requested them, shouldn't be the user be liable instead? The same way social networks are not liable for content uploaded by users? I think here there is a somewhat double standard. Of course, maybe OpenAI et al should have get a license before training on the lyrics or to avoid training on copyrighted content. But the first would be expensive and the latter would requir…

> However, the lyrics are shown because an action is the user so, shouldn't be the user be liable instead?

Same goes for websites where you can watch piracy streams. "The action is the user pressing play" sounds like it might win you an internet argument, but I'm 99% sure none of the courts will play those games, you as the operator who enabled whatever the user could do ends up liable.

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

#64

Post by dathinab »

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.

first due to how the EU unified marked works they would have to cut it from all of the EU not just Germany

second it probably would be good for the EU and even US as it would de-monopolize the market a bit before that becomes fully impossible

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

#65

Post by hrimfaxi »

estebarb wrote: post #62

However, the lyrics are shown because the user requested them, shouldn't be the user be liable instead? The same way social networks are not liable for content uploaded by users? I think here there is a somewhat double standard. Of course, maybe OpenAI et al should have get a license before training on the lyrics or to avoid training on copyrighted content. But the first would be expensive and the latter would requir…

Why should the user be liable? They didn't reproduce the copyrighted work and the machine is totally capable of denying output (like it already does for other categories of material).

At the very least, the users being liable instead of OpenAI makes no sense. Like arresting only drug users and not dealers.

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

#66

Post by mrweasel »

embedding-shape wrote: post #61
mrweasel wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 80 million Germans. If you where OpenAI, or it's shareholders, would you leave that market open for a competitor? No, you'd make a version of your product without the lyrics. More EU countries are going to follow and reach the same conclusion, especially now that Germany has set a legal precedence. Should OpenAI just pull out of a market with 500 million people and leave it to Claude, Perplexity or someone…

> 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…

> I think it's "precedent", not "precedence",

I think you're right, also not native English speaker.

No, you're right that a German can't influence e.g. the similar lawsuit against Suno in Denmark, but as you point out, it can, and most likely will be cited, and I think it's often the case that this carries a lot of weight.

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

#68

Post by loudmax »

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.

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

#69

Post by lvncelot »

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.

> cut off ChatGPT in Germany

God I can only hope

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

#70

Post by est31 »

Another instance of GEMA fighting an american company. Anyone who was on the german internet in the first half of the last decade remembers the "not available in your country" error messages on youtube because Google didn't make a deal with GEMA.

I don't think that we will end up here with such a scenario: lyrics are pervasive and probably also quoted in a lot of other publications. Furthermore, it's not just about lyrics but one can make a similar argument about any published literary work. GEMA is for music but for literary publications there is VG Wort who in fact already have an AI license.

I rather think that OpenAI will license the works from GEMA instead. Ultimately this will be beneficial for the likes of OpenAI because it can serve as a means to keep out the small players. I'm sure that GEMA won't talk to the smaller startups in the field about licensing.

Is this good for the average musician/author? these organizations will probably distribute most of the money to the most popular ones, even though AI models benefit from quantity of content instead of popularity.

https://www.vgwort.de/veroeffentlichungen/aenderung-der-wahr...

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