Key takeaways: A German court has ruled in favor of GEMA, accepting the unfair use of copyrighted songs by OpenAI while training its LLM models.
The court relied on the memorization vs reproduction arguments in the light of TDM exceptions under the EU Act to rule in favor of GEMA.
This is in contrast to cases in the US, like the Anthropic vs UMG or the NYT vs OpenAI & Microsoft case, where no concrete decisions have been made.
OpenAI has been dealt a significant blow in its case against GEMA, as the court ruled against the AI giant.
GEMA is a collective management organization representing stakeholders of the music industry (including lyricists, composers, and producers) that sued OpenAI for using nine well-known German songs for training its AI models, especially its 4 and 4-o models.
First, GEMA disabled ChatGPT’s web search capability and then assigned it the role of a ‘lyrics expert.’ After this, prompts like “What are the lyrics to (this song)?”, “Can you tell me the chorus?” or “What was the first verse of (this song)?” were fed into ChatGPT.
Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly), the model was able to produce exact verses of the songs requested, albeit with a bit of hallucination. For instance, it produced 25 consecutive words from the song 36 Grad and over 70 words of “Über den Wolken.”
And hey, these aren’t any under-the-radar songs ChatGPT just came across in the dumps of the internet. They are, in fact, hyper-popular German songs.
Think of songs like “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver or “Hips Don’t Lie” by Shakira. Scraping ultra-mainstream songs like these isn’t something that could have happened by chance.
The Court’s Ruling
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