ChatGPT violated copyright law by ‘learning’ from song lyrics, German court rules

A court in Munich has ruled that OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT violated German copyright laws by using hits from top-selling musicians to train its language models in what creative industry advocates described as a landmark European ruling.

The Munich regional court sided in favour of Germany’s music rights society GEMA, which said ChatGPT had harvested protected lyrics by popular artists to “learn” from them.
The collecting society GEMA, which manages the rights of composers, lyricists and music publishers and has approximately 100,000 members, filed the case against OpenAI in November 2024.

The lawsuit was seen as a key European test case in a campaign to stop AI scraping of creative output. OpenAI can appeal against the decision.

ChatGPT allows users to ask questions and type commands into a chatbot, which responds with text that resembles human language patterns. The model underlying ChatGPT is trained on widely available data.

The case revolved around nine of the most recognisable German hits of recent decades, which were used by ChatGPT to hone its language capabilities.

They included Herbert Grönemeyer’s 1984 synth-pop sendup of masculinity, Männer (Men), and Helene Fischer’s Atemlos Durch die Nacht (Breathless Through the Night), which was the unofficial anthem of the German side during the 2014 football World Cup.