AI and Copyright Case Tracker

Germany

The plaintiff claims that standard terms and conditions in contracts between a newspaper and a freelance journalist

• that require the journalist to grant the newspaper rights to use journalists' work for AI training and use
• and permit the transfer of these rights of use without further remuneration should be seen as invalid unfair contract terms creating an unreasonable disadvantage for the journalist.

The Hungarian court requested a preliminary ruling by the European Court of Justice on the following questions:

• Communication to the public: Is it a copyright infringement if the chatbot shows parts of articles that are protected; if so, does it matter that the AI chatbot only predicts words based on patterns it has learned?
• Reproduction During Training: Does using patterns from existing texts during training qualify as reproduction, and is this allowed under the EU’s text and data mining exception?
• Reproduction by Output: Is it reproduction if the chatbot’s reply includes part or all of a press article based on a user's prompt?

French collecting societies claim

• copyright infringement due to the alleged unauthorized use of copyright protected works for the purpose of training an AI model.
• economic unfairness (parasitism) due to the use of third party investment and creative efforts without contribution to their costs

German music collecting society GEMA claims

• that the AI tool Suno infringes copyright by generating content that closely resembles GEMA works
• that Suno used GEMA works for purposes of training its AI model without authorization.

• The downloading and storage of data in the search engine’s index for the purpose of creating AI generated snippets of articles is permitted under the TDM exception
• The plaintiff did not opt out of the TDM in the form required by law.

The German music collecting society GEMA claims that

• the defendant's chatbot uses copyright-protected song lyrics for training its AI without license
• the protected song lyrics are made publicly available in the output of the defendant's chatbot without remuneration

Dutch media companies claimed that the AI created summaries of protected works infringed copyright. The court

• decided that the use was justified by legal exceptions, including the TDM exception
• stated that opt-out declarations must be specific and that an opt-out declared via a robots.txt protocol excluding only certain AI bots was not a valid opt-out from the TDM exception.

• The defendant’s use of the plaintiff’s photography (matching a downloaded image with pre-existing descriptions) qualified as text and data mining for purposes of scientific research, without a possibility to opt out
• The TDM exception likely also covers uses for the purpose of AI training
• An out-opt to TDM must be specific, but can be declared in natural language in the terms and conditions of a website

• Under Czech copyright law, only natural persons can be authors of copyright-protected works.
• An image generated by AI based on a common prompt does not qualify for copyright protection