OpenAI lost a lawsuit in Munich: the company will have to pay for using song lyrics in ChatGPT

The American company OpenAI lost a copyright case in a Munich court, so it will have to pay for the use of song lyrics in ChatGPT, UNN reports with reference to DW.

Details

A Munich court ruled that the ChatGPT language model violated German laws by using song lyrics in its responses without paying royalties. The company was ordered to pay damages. The lawsuit against OpenAI was filed by the German association GEMA, which protects copyrights in Germany. The court considered the illegal use of nine German-language songs.

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Neither party denied during the proceedings that the song lyrics were used to train the fourth version of ChatGPT. The dispute was whether the text of the compositions was stored in the language model's database for future use. OpenAI argued that ChatGPT does not store or copy specific training data. The company shifted responsibility to users who can contribute to the generation of "output data" by making specific queries.

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Addendum

The publication emphasizes that in Germany, copyright law is focused on the author. Rights are not considered the property of the publisher or record company, but are assigned to the author himself and, as a rule, are not fully transferred to third parties.