Comment by embedding-shape

Comment by embedding-shape 4 hours ago

5 replies

> 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.

dathinab 3 hours ago

> 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).

tremon 3 hours ago

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.

  • freejazz 2 hours ago

    US copyright law originates in the constitution and the US does not follow a number of elements of the Berne convention, such as moral rights.

mrweasel 4 hours ago

> 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.

freejazz 2 hours ago

>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.

Do you have some sort of different understanding of copyright law where it's legal to commercially use lyrics (verbatim, mind you) without a license?