Openai May Not Use Lyrics Without License, German Court Rules

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.

(Vis a vis, I take it you write a certified letter to Universal before reproducing Happy Birthday in public? ;) That is actually a far more egregious violation indeed, as it is both a performance of the copyrighted work and in front of an audience - neither of which are the case for the chatbot - yet one we all seem to understand to be fair use.

Some places have a concept of de minimus as applied to copyright. It is often not prosecuted to have an acoustic guitar and an open case and play music on a park bench. You may need a license for busking in some places - but that's not tied to the music that you play (it could be your own or it could be covers).

I am not saying that it is legal, but rather that it is beneath the notice of the courts.

- You asking the painter to create a Mickey Mouse painting: not illegal. You still are asking for a derivative work without permission, but if used privately you're good (this is different per jurisdiction) - The artist creating the painting of a derivative work is acting illegally - they are selling you the picture and hence this is a commercial act and trademark infringement - Displaying the bought Mickey Mouse image publicly is likely infringement, but worse is if you would charge admission to show the picture, that would definitely be illegal - If you were to hide the image in your basement and look at it privately, it would most likely not be illegal (private use - but see first point since this is different per jurisdiction)

Comparing violations doesn't really make sense (the artist creating it vs. you displaying it) - the act of creating the image for money is illegal. If it were the artist creating the image for him/herself - that would be fine.

Now getting back to the LLM and your question which also the court answered (jurisdiction: Germany). The courts opinion is that the AI recreating these lyrics by itself is illegal (think about the artist creating the image for you for money).

Personally I would think the key part and similarity is the payment. You pay for using OpenAI. You pay for it creating those lyrics/texts. In my head I can create a similar reasoning to your Mickey Mouse example. If we'd take open source LLMs and THEY would create perfect lyrics, I think the court would have a much harder case to make. Who would you be suing and for what kind of money? It would all be open source and nobody is paying anyone anything to recreate the lyrics. It would be and is very hard to prove that the LLMs were trained on copyrighted material - in the lyrics example, they may have ingested illegal lyrics-sharing sites, but they may also just have ingested Twitter or Reddit where people talk about the lyrics - how could any LLM know that these contents were illegal or not to be ingested.

The problem is if OpenAI is liable for reproducing copyrighted content, so will be other products such as word processors, video editors and so on. So, as society where we will put the line?

Are we going to tolerate some copyright infringement in these tools or are we going to pursue copyright infringements even in other tools as we already got the tools to detect it?

We cannot have double standards, law should be applied equally to everyone.

I do think that overall making OpenAI liable for output is a bad precedent, because of repercusions beyond AI tools. I'm all fine with making them liable for having trained on copyrighted content and so on...

The social networks are distributing such content AND benefiting from selling ads on them. Adding ads on top is a derivative work.

Personally I'm on the side of penalizing the side that provides the input, not the output:

- OpenAI training on copyrighted works. - Users requesting custom works based on copyrighted IP

That is my opinion on how it should be layered, that's it. I'm happy to discuss why it should be that way or why not. As I put in other comment, my concern is that mandating copyright filtering o each generative tool would end up propagating to every single digital tool, which as society we don't really want.

Nothing in the ruling says it is legal to start outputting and selling content based off the results of that training process.

That LLMs would be as expensively priced as they really are on society and energy costs? A lot of things are possible, whether they are economically feasible is determined by giving them a price. When that price doesn't reflect the real costs, society starts to wast work on weird things, like building large AI centers, because of a financial bubble. And yes putting people out of business does come with a cost.

"Innovation" is not an end goal.

I think they try to expand copyright from "protected expression" to "protected patterns and abstractions", or in other words "infringement without substantial similarity". Otherwise why would they sue AI companies? It makes no sense:

1. If I wanted a specific author, I would get the original works, it is easy. Even if I am cheap it is still much easier to pirate than use generative models. In fact AI is the worst infringement tool ever invented - it almost never reproduces faithfully, it is slow and expensive to use. Much more expensive than copying which is free, instant and makes perfect replicas.

2. If I wanted AI, it means I did not want the original, I wanted something Else. So why sue people who don't want the originals? The only reason to use AI is when you want to steer the process to generate something personalized. It is not to replace the original authors, if that is what I needed no amount of AI would be able to compare to the originals. If you look carefully almost all AI outputs get published in closed chat rooms, with a small fraction being shared online, and even then not in the same venues as the original authors. So the market substitution logic is flimsy.

because other than public domain they all require at least displaying the license, which "AI" ignores

> When building its tool, Ross sought to license Westlaw’s content as training data for its AI search engine. As the two are competitors, Thomson Reuters refused. Instead, Ross hired a third party, LegalEase, to provide training data in the form of “Bulk Memos,” which were created using Westlaw headnotes. Thomson Reuters’s suit followed, alleging that Ross had infringed upon its copyrighted Westlaw headnotes by using them to train the AI tool.