First action brought by a collective managment organization against a provider of generative AI systems
GEMA is the first European collective management organization to file a lawsuit against OpenAI over the unlicensed use of copyright works.
GEMA has become the first European collective management organization to file a lawsuit over the unlicensed use of copyright-protected musical works against a provider of generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Specifically, this pertains to the U.S.-based company OpenAI, the operator of auto-generative AI chatbot systems. GEMA accuses OpenAI of reproducing copyright-protected song lyrics by German authors without obtaining the necessary licenses or compensating the authors of the copyright works used. The lawsuit aims to demonstrate that OpenAI systematically utilizes GEMA’s repertoire to train its AI systems.
This case could have far-reaching implications for managing copyrights in relation to AI models and for defining the role of collective management organizations in this process.
The District Court of Hamburg ruled in the case of Kneschke v. LAION e.V. that LAION did not infringe the copyright of photographer Kneschke, as the use of his photograph was covered by the exception for text and data mining (TDM) for scientific purposes.
“Can copyright bring artificial intelligence to its knees? Which other circumstances may cause that the “making” of generative AI can dramatically change in the (near) future. This short paper presents potential challenges that copyright poses to the training of the machines on large amount of data. Different jurisdictions address these issues differently. In the USA the legality of these activities is tested in several court cases. Do gentlemen’s agreements and pragmatic symbiosis known from the “search engines business model” provide sufficient basis and/or incentive for the business model of “making” generative AI business model as well?
On Friday, September 27, 2024, the last day of the international conference “Converging Realms: Law, Technology, and Society in the Age of Ethical and Multi-Agent AI” took place. Dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič took part in the 4th panel entitled Artificial Intelligence+Research.