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OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
81–90 of 256 posts
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone hires me as a secretary, and they ask me what is the lyrics of a song, there is no law that prohibits me from telling them if I know and I don't have to license the lyrics in order to do so. If they hire me primarily to recite lyrics, then sure, that would probably be some manner of infringement if I don't license them. But I feel like the case with a language model is much more the former than the latter.
As soon as you take the LLM output and publicize it, it turns around and is a lot more akin to having your secretary read out the lyrics publicly. If you don't publicize it in any way, how would the copyright holder ever find out?
But the LLM is not advertised as a lyrics DB, and it in no way guarantees that it will reproduce the lyrics accurately, and similarly the copyright holder will never know that it's reproducing the lyrics unless it snoops on my conversations with it, or go ask it directly.
But then with the analogy, if I'm a secretary and the copyright holder of lyrics calls me and asks if I know the lyrics of one of their songs, I don't think it's infringement to say yes and then repeat it back to them.
The LLM is not publicising anything, it's just doing what you ask it to do, it's the humans using it publicising the output.
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#83However, 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…
This is such a bad take.
If that was case then Google wouldn't receive DMCA takedown of piracy links, instead offer up users searching for piracy content. Former is more prevalent than latter because one, it requires invasion of privacy - you have to serve up everyone's search results
two, it requires understanding of intent.
Same is the issue here. OpenAI then needs to share all chats for courts to shift through and second, how to judge intent. If someone asks for a German pop song and OpenAI decides to output Bochum - whose fault is that?
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#84Earlier 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…
> That's not how laws and regulations work in European or even EU countries
yes, even if just looking at other court cases in Germany the role of precedent is "in general" not quite as powerful (as Courts are supposed to follow what the law says not what other courts say). To be clear this is quite a bit oversimplified. Other court ruling does still matter in practice, especially if it is from higher courts. But it's very different to how it is commonly presented to work in the US (can't say if it actually works that way).
but also EU member states do synchronize the general working of many laws to make a unified marked practically possible and this does include the general way copy right works (by implementing different country specific laws which all follow the same general framework, so details can differ)
and the parts which are the same are pretty clear about that
- if you distribute a copy of something it's a copy right violation no matter the technical details
a human memorizing the content and then reproducing it would still make it a copy right infringement, so it should be pretty obvious that this applies to LLMs to, where you potentially could even argue that it's not just "memorizing it" but storing it compressed and a bit lossy....
and that honestly isn't just the case in the Germany, or the EU, the main reason AI companies got mostly away with it so far is due to judges being pressured to rule leniently as "it's the future of humanity", "the country wouldn't be able to compete" etc. etc. Or in other words corruption (as politicians are supposed to change laws if things change not tell judges to not do their job properly).
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#85While I partially understand (but not support) the hate against AI due to possible plagiarism and "low effort generation" of works, think about the whole process: If model providers will be liable for generating output, that resembles lyrics or very short texts that fall under copyright laws, they will just change their business model. E.g. why offering lame chat agents as a service, when you can keep the value gener…
If there is such an immense value in spinning off and selling models separately you can bet that will happen - without court saying so. At the end running these models is a costly job and you'd want to squeeze out every value.
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#86[dead]
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#87However, 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.
I think that is completely different. Piracy websites do only one thing. Chatbots are different.
My concern is that where are we going to put the line: If I type a copyrighted song in Word is Microsoft liable? If I upload a lyric to ChatGPT and ask it to analyze or translate it, is it a copyright violation?
I totally understand your line of thinking. However, the one I'm suggesting could be applied as well and it has precedents in law (intellectual authors of crimes are punishable, not only the perpetrators).
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#88I 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.
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Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#89Earlier 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…
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 to me that EU member states have different laws in this particular area.
That said, the EU uses the civil law model and precedent doesn't quite have the same weight here as it does under common law.
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#90However, 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.
There are countries where drug consumption/posesion is penalized too. There is a similar example in other area: For instance, in Sweeden, Norway and Belize selling sex (aka prostitution) is legal, but buying it is not legal. So, your example actually exists in world legislation.
I'm just asking where are we going to put the line and why.