A German court sided with the country’s music rights society, GEMA, ruling that OpenAI (OPENAI) cannot use song lyrics without a license, Reuters reported.
Presiding Judge Elke Schwager ordered Microsoft (MSFT)-backed OpenAI to pay damages for the use of copyrighted material, the report added.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha.
GEMA had noted that OpenAI’s ChatGPT reproduces lyrics from copyrighted German songs without authorization and that its AI was trained on copyrighted content from the portfolio of its nearly 100,000 members, who include best-selling musician Herbert Groenemeyer, the report added.
OpenAI said that GEMA’s arguments reflected a misunderstanding of how ChatGPT works, the report noted.
GEMA is looking to set up a licensing framework that would require AI developers to pay for the use of musical works in both training and output.
The decision can be appealed, the report added.
Tech companies, including OpenAI and Microsoft, have seen lawsuits from authors and news outlets as well for allegedly misusing content to train AI models. In September, Anthropic (ANTHRO) settled a civil suit and agreed to pay authors $1.5B in a landmark copyright case involving the use of training AI models on pirated copies of books.