A German court has ruled that OpenAI infringed the copyright of nine popular songs in a lawsuit brought by music rights group GEMA.
On Tuesday, the Munich regional court ruled that the US company had used copyrighted song lyrics to train its ChatGPT language chatbot and that the reproduction of the lyrics in its outputs had taken place without a licence.
GEMA, which sued OpenAI in 2024, claimed that OpenAI’s ChatGPT reproduced German song lyrics that were protected by copyright without authorisation.
The organisation also accused OpenAI of training its chatbots using content that came directly from artists who were members of the association.
The German music rights group has around 100,000 members, including musician and actor Herbert Groenemeyer, who is very popular in Austria, Germany and Switzerland.
The court found that OpenAI’s ChatGPT reproduced lyrics from nine well-known German songs, including Helene Fischer’s “Atemlos durch die Nacht” and Herbert Grönemeyer’s “Männer”, without proper authorisation.
The Munich court ruled that OpenAI is now prohibited from using copyrighted lyrics without a license in Germany. Judge Elke Schwager ordered the company to pay damages for using copyrighted material.
OpenAI said that GEMA’s arguments “reflected a misunderstanding of how ChatGPT works,” Reuters reported.
The news comes after OpenAI has already faced several lawsuits in the US. In recent years, media groups and authors have claimed that ChatGPT uses content created by artists without licence or authorisation. The Munich case is the first major case of its kind in Europe.
In January last year, OpenAI told the UK parliament that it is impossible to train its generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) services without access to copyrighted work.
At the time, the company, along with backer Microsoft, was facing a lawsuit from the New York Times, which has accused the AI tech company of “unlawful use” of its work to create its products.
In April last year, around 200 artists including Zayn Malik and Billie Eilish signed an open letter calling for the end of the “predatory” use of AI.
Represented by the Artists’ Rights Alliance, a non-profit advocating for musicians, performers and songwriters in the digital landscape, the artists asked developers, music services and technology companies to stop using AI to “sabotage creativity” and undermine artists, songwriters and musicians.
Last month, Universal Music Group (UMG) announced the settlement of a copyright infringement litigation with AI-powered music creation platform Udio.
Under “industry-first” strategic agreements between the two companies, as well as the compensatory legal settlement, the firms have agreed to launch a new licenced AI music creation platform.
UMG is also the first company to enter into AI-related agreements with YouTube, TikTok, Meta, KDDI, KLAY Vision, BandLab, Soundlabs and Pro-Rata, among others.
The settlement follows a dispute by UMG which accused the AI business of copyright infringement.
UMG said that the new platform, which will be launched in 2026, will be powered by new “cutting-edge” generative AI technology that will be trained on authorised and licensed music.
