German court rules in favor of AI developer in dispute over photographer’s Copyright infringement

German court rules in favor of AI developer in dispute over photographer’s Copyright infringement

At the beginning of October, the Hamburg District Court handed down the judgment involving the discussion of copyright infringement in text and data mining (TDM) to feed the database of an artificial intelligence (AI). In the ruling, the German court held that the use of copyrighted images in the training process of the AI in question was covered by exceptions provided for in the legislation, notably in relation to use for scientific research purposes.

The lawsuit was filed in 2023 by German photographer Robert Kneschke, who discovered that some of his photographs had been included in the database of the artificial intelligence (AI) model LAION. He asked for the images to be removed, but the German company LAION, developer of the technology, argued that it had no images, only links to where the images could be found online. The photographer argued that the data mining process included making copies of the images to extract information and that this amounted to copyright infringement. Thus, he claimed that copies had been made of the photographs in question and that they did not fall within the exceptions present in the German copyright law (Urheberrechtsgesetz, “UrhG”), in sections 44a (temporary copies), 44b (text and data mining) and 60d (text and data mining for scientific purposes).

For its part, the LAION company did not dispute the existence of the copies, but argued that this action would be covered by the exception for text and data mining provided for in Article 3 of Directive 2019/790 of the European Union (Digital Single Market Directive, “DSM Directive”), which provides for an exception for “reproductions and extractions made by research organizations and cultural heritage institutions to carry out, for the purposes of scientific research, text and data mining of works or other materials to which they have lawful access”.

In the ruling, the Hamburg District Court held that LAION was a research organization and, as such, would be covered by section 60d of German copyright law and by the aricle 3 of the DSM Directive). According to the ruling, “contrary to the author’s opinion, the creation of a dataset of the type in dispute, which can be the basis for training AI systems, can certainly be considered scientific research. Although the creation of the dataset as such may not yet be associated with a gain in knowledge, it is a fundamental stage of work with the aim of using the dataset for the purpose of further knowledge gain. It can be said that this objective also existed in this case. For this, it is enough that the dataset was – indisputably – published free of charge and therefore made available to researchers (also) in the field of artificial neural networks.”

Then, addressing the issue of temporary copies (section 44a UrhG, which allows the temporary and incidental reproduction of data if necessary for the operation of a technical process), the Hamburg court held that the copies made by LAION were not temporary, since the deletion of the data was not independent of the user (and linked to the mere technical process), but due to a deliberate programming of the analysis process.

Finally, in understanding the commercial use of data mining for commercial purposes, the court argued that although LAION was used by commercial organizations, the dataset itself was released to the public free of charge, and no evidence was presented that any commercial body had control over its operations. In this sense, the decision emphasizes that: “the fact that the dataset in dispute may also be used by commercially active companies for training or developing their AI systems is, however, irrelevant to the classification of the defendant’s activities. The mere fact that individual members of the defendant also carry out paid activities for these companies, in addition to their activities for the association, is not sufficient to attribute the activities of these companies to the defendant as its own.” With this reasoning, the court dismissed the photographer’s claim and concluded that LAION was covered by the data mining exceptions for the training of its AI tool and had not infringed the plaintiff’s copyright.

The decision (available only in German) can be accessed via the link: https://pdfupload.io/docs/4bcc432c

Note: For quick release, this English version is provided by automated translation without human review.