The Munich I Regional Court (Ref. 42 O 14139/24) has handed down its eagerly awaited ruling in the case of GEMA v. OpenAI Ireland Ltd./OpenAI LLC, which operates the AI program ChatGPT. GEMA filed a lawsuit because nine song lyrics—including well-known German songs such as “Atemlos” by Kristina Bach and “Männer” by Herbert Grönemeyer—were used by the ChatGPT system without a license and were played back largely true to the original in response to corresponding user queries.
A landmark ruling in the first instance, which is already generating anticipation for the next instance and then the Federal Court of Justice:
- The Munich Regional Court assumed that training the language model with the song lyrics and, in particular, outputting these texts in identical or nearly identical wording constituted a reproduction relevant to copyright law.
- The mere storage or “memorization” of the lyrics in ChatGPT was considered an infringement of the exploitation right pursuant to Section 16 of the German Copyright Act (UrhG). ChatGPT had not generated the song lyrics anew, but had resorted to the stored lyrics.
- The limitation provision of Section 44b UrhG (“text & data mining”) was not applicable because not only had information been extracted, but complete works or word sequences had been taken over and stored in a reproducible form.
- The output of the song lyrics – the AI output – constituted making available to the public within the meaning of Section 19a UrhG or reproduction.