OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
(reuters.com)85 points by aiz0Houp 3 hours ago
85 points by aiz0Houp 3 hours ago
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.
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...
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.
> 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).
> I think that is completely different. Piracy websites do only one thing. Chatbots are different.
Well...YouTube is liable for any copyrighted material on their site, and do 'more than one thing'
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.
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?
It would be so hilarious if GEMA was actually useful for once and not a detriment to society and artists in general.
However of course OpenAI will ignore this and at worst nothing will change and at best they get a slap on the wrist and a fine and continue scraping.
You can’t take that stuff out of the models at this point anyway.
Nah. It’s so easy for OpenAI to modify their output. I’m already seeing them restrict news article re-generation by newspaper name. They do it to reduce liability. There’s also a big copyright infringement case coming up in the USA this year, and being able to point to responsiveness to complaints will be a key part of their legal defense I bet.
You can modify the output but the underlying model is always susceptible to jail breaks. A method I tried a couple months ago to reliably get it to explain to me how to cook meth step by step still works. I’m not gonna share it, you just have to take my word on this.
I made a living from GEMA payments some while back, but dear lord, so much of how the institution does what it does feels so bad and zero-sum. Might just be that the world would be better off without it. It does something important for right holders for sure, but (and I understand, I am heavily back-seating here without offering a solution) there must be better ways to go about it.
Now, without the fimförderung all those grim dark arthouse movies where people yell "Scheisse!" in Berlin stairwells would never be made. And all that public gremium pleasing shovelware, looking extracute and boring clogging up the appstores with zero sales, what would we do without that. Take anything popular streamingwise and ask yourself would it get through and by. And if it was stopped by what and who.. fire that, to fix germanys media sector.
It'd be equally hilarious if that VC money would be used to actually better society by crushing GEMA in court.
But realistically, all that will happen is that the "Pauschalabgabe" is extended to AI subscriptions, making stuff more expensive for everyone.
With AI slop showing up everywhere, there’s a real danger that folks will just no longer be motivated to produce real original content.
With all major models not basically trained on nearly all available data, beyond the financial AI bubble about to burst there’s also a big content bubble that’s about exhausted as folks are just pumping out slop vs producing original creative human output. That may be the ultimate long term tragedy of the present AI hype cycle. Expect “made by a human” to soon be a tag associated with premium brands and customer experiences.
AI slop is like 90’s websites and desktop publishing - there’s a novelty for AI-newbie-creators driving them to churn out lazy crap, while being oblivious to how it lands with strangers.
Tastes will mature, society will more vocally mock this crap, and we’ll stop seeing the sloppier stuff come out of reputable locations.
You assume that the public recognizes AI slop for what it is. Across platforms now, people are readily engaging with blatant AI text posts and generated images as if they are bona-fide. In fact, if you point out that the poster is a bot, you may well well get some flack from the community.
> Expect “made by a human” to soon be a tag associated with premium brands and customer experiences.
I went to a grammar school and I write in mostly pretty high-quality sentences with a bit of British English colloquialism. I spell well, spend time thinking about what I am saying and try to speak clearly, etc.
I've always tried to be kind about people making errors but I am currently retraining my mind to see spelling mistakes and grammar errors as inherent authenticity. Because one thing ChatGPT and its ilk cannot do -- I guess architecturally —- is act convincingly like those who misspell, accidentally coin new eggcorns, accidentally use malapropisms, or use novel but terrible grammar.
And you're right: IMO the rage against the cultural damage AI will do is only just beginning, and I don't think people have clocked on to the fact that economic havoc is built-in, success or failure.
The web/AI/software-tech industry will be loathed even more than it is now (and this loathing is increasingly justified)
> one thing ChatGPT and its ilk cannot do -- I guess architecturally —- is act convincingly like those who misspell, accidentally coin new eggcorns, accidentally use malapropisms, or use novel but terrible grammar
Just wait a few more years until the majority of ChatGPT training data is filled with misspellings, accidental eggcorns, malapropisms and terrible grammar.
That, and AI slop itself.
> With AI slop showing up everywhere, there’s a real danger that folks will just no longer be motivated to produce real original content.
I think people would still produce original things as long they have the means for doing it. I guess we could say it is our nature. My fear is AI monopolizing the wealth that once would go to support people producing art.
We already have this in the physical world.
Plastic/synthetics are the slop of the physical world. They're a side product of extracting oil and gas so they're extremely cheap.
Yet if you look at synthetics by volume, probably 99% of them are used just because they're cheaper than the natural alternative. Yes, some have characteristics that are novel, but by and large everything we do with plastics is ultimately based on "they're cheaper".
Plastics, unfortunately, aren't going away.
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.
> Have you considered that not everyone wants that? Or that it might not be the best thing?
Did I suggest either of those things?
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 else entirely?
It doesn't appear that modern LLMs are really that hard to build, expensive perhaps, but if you have monopoly on a large enough market, price isn't really your main concern.
> 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.
> 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).
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.
> 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.
Yeah? Which commercial provider’s model do you think was trained without using lyrics?
Obviously there's a limit, reproducing a single sentence is unlikely to be copyright infringement just because there are only so many words in a language; but if reproducing some text would be copyright infringement if a human did it, I don't see why LLM companies should get a free pass.
If it's really essential that they train their models on song lyrics, or books, or movie scripts, or articles, or whatever, they should pay license fees.
This obviously applies to all copyrighted works. I could sue OpenAI when it reproduces my source code that I published on the Internet.
They already "filter" the code to prevent it from happening (reproducing exact works). My guess it is just superficially changing things around so it is harder to prove copyright violations.
Conversely, last week we had Spain being willing to cut off Cloudflare (!) to protect football match royalties.
> I don’t think a country’s government can justify no commercial LLMs to its populace.
Counter-argument: can any country's government justify allowing its population and businesses to become completely dependent on an overseas company which does not comply with its laws? (For Americans, think "China" in this case)
I come from the country with the world’s oldest continuous parliament, and they change the law all the time. Arguably that’s all the majority of politicians do.
German student performance will plateau, while all other countries slowly decline.
Lyrics produced some of the first AI slop I noticed after ChatGPT was launched in late 2022, even if the large models hadn’t been trained on them specifically. Overnight there were a bunch of different advertising-laden sites that clearly scraped Genius or other lyric websites, and then had GPT generate commentaries on what the lyrics supposedly mean, so that these would get picked up by search engines.
The result was mostly comical, the commentaries for vacuous pop music all sounded more or less the same: “‘Shake Your Booty’ by KC and the Sunshine Band expresses the importance of letting one’s hair down and letting loose. The song communicates to listeners how liberating it is to gyrate one’s posterior and dance.” Definitely one of the first signs that this new tech was not going to be good for the web.
Guess even AI can’t resist singing along! But seriously, copyright laws don’t hit pause just because it’s “machine learning.” Time for AI to learn the lyrics and the legal notes.
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These people would stream German schlager to every screen and speaker in Europe and charge for it 100 EUR monthly per breathing person, if they could. They are violent.
Of course the models are not human, but if you consider this situation as if they are persons, then the question becomes: May a person read lyrics and tell it to someone when asked, and the court's ruling basically says no, this may not happen, which makes little sense.
I guess the main difference between the situation with language models and humans is one of scale.
I think the question should be viewed like this, if I as a corporation do the same thing but just with humans, would it be legal or not. Given a hypothetical of hiring a bunch of people, having them read a bunch of lyrics, and then having them answer questions about lyrics. If no law prohibits the hypothetical with people, then I don't see why it should be prohibited with language models, and if it is prohibited with people, then there should be no specific AI ruling needed.
All this being said, Europe is rapidly becoming even more irrelevant than it was, living of the largess of the US and China, it's like some uncontacted tribe ruling that satellites can't take areal photos of them. It's all good and well, just irrelevant. I guess Germany can always go the route of North Korea if they want.
> "May a person read lyrics and tell it to someone when asked"
If you sell tickets to an event where you read the lyrics aloud, it's commercial performance and you need to pay the author. (Usually a cover artist would be singing, but that's not a requirement.)
So it's not like a human can recite the lyrics anywhere freely either.
You don't even have to sell tickets: if it's a free concert, copyright is likely infringed. This is likely true in all jurisdictions.
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.
> May a person read lyrics and tell it to someone when asked, and the court's ruling basically says no, this may not happen, which makes little sense.
I think the difference here is that your example is what a search engine might do, whereas AI is taking the lyrics, using them to create new lyrics, and then passing them off as its own.
> whereas AI is taking the lyrics, using them to create new lyrics, and then passing them off as its own.
Is this not something every single creative person ever has done? Is this not what creating is? We take in the world, and then create something based on that.
Highly additive nicotine formulations targeted at teens is not exactly “new technology”.
They aren't! They're subject to licensing!
https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/rap-genius-deserv... (2013)
Long ago the first site I remember to do this was lyrics.ch, which was long since shut down by litigation. I'm not endorsing the status quo here, but if the licensing system exists it is obviously unfair to exempt parties from it simply because they're too big to comply.
Member when music sites were suing YouTube for music videos, and now they are begging people to watch them there and YT view counts are a bragging topic?
Soon music industry will be begging OpenAI for exposure of their content, just like the media industry is begging Google for scraping.
While 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 generation in-house. E.g. have a strategy board that identifies possible use cases for your model, then spin off a company that just does agentic coding, music generation. Just cut off the end users/public form the model access, and flood the market with AI generated apps/content/works yourself (or with selected partners). Then have a lawyer checking right before publishing.
So this court decision may turn everything worse? I don't know.