“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.”
I understand (to agree degree) going after AI companies for reproducing the lyrics in a way that would not normally be protected by copyright but outright scraping is going too far from a moral standpoint.
There’s a good argument to be made about abusing their resources to do the scraping as I’ve heard complaints of site owners getting overwhelmed by AI crawlers but provided you’re not doing that I think scraping should be allowed generally speaking even if the operator disallows it, since without that search engines break and archival (especially to prove malice) go out the window.
I’m inclined to take an approach of “you can ingest whatever you want, but you are liable for reproduction, and if preventing reproduction is too onerous, then you probably should get the licences to permit it or don’t ingest that data”. Even that has some caveats since that reasoning would decimate social media services and personal/community spaces if actually enforced which is kinda what Safe Harbor helps protect.
So, if my brain ‘ingested’ a song lyric and now I can sing it, does that mean I owe GEMA royalties every time I hum in the shower? asking for a friend. who is me. my friend is me.
Unless you are performing it for others, or for profit, they generally don’t care.
They sure would like that.
Never thought I’d hail the GEMA for what they’re doing…
How is it an “undisclosed [amount of] damages” - aren’t court rulings supposed to be public [records]?
I know stuff like the rulings of me going to court with the driver and insurance companies involved in a car accident certainly was public (in Germany).
Anyone in the know please ELI5 and/or point me at the relevant laws, how/what/in which cases (parts of) rulings can be “undisclosed”.
Settlements can go undisclosed by agreement of the parties involved. Civil court is different from criminal; the former is for the benefit of interested parties, the latter is for the benefit of the public at large. Criminal courts can do some things behind closed doors as well but that usually requires a need of the state (such as protection of a judge, jury, state, etc.)
This is assuming a legal system similar to that in OPs post.
I think “ingesting” is more accurate than “learning”.
The judge should be disbarred. This is thought policing. That is the long term inevitability that this precedent creates. This is next level dystopian dark ages. Abstract thought is dead. The fuckwits have no big picture logic. You are no longer allowed to share any knowledge or speak of anything you have ever read. There is no such thing as an original thought. Everything you have is from standing on the shoulders of others.
Lol, a generation of fuckwits.
Is ChatGPT a legal entity competent to violate copyright law? I don’t think that’s likely.
I do think OpenAI violated copyright law by copying song lyrics and other media to use them as input to their LLM systems, to embed the essence of them into their LLMs for commercial benefit. Judging by the valuations of the companies that do not yet have significant income compared to the investments, on the face of it, the IP they copied, often without license, as far as I know, is fantastically valuable.
Does that mean song lyric websites with ads also violate copyright laws?
According to Are Song Lyrics Copyrighted? How the Law Works, unless their use is ‘fair use’ or they have a license, then they are violating copyright, if I understand the article correctly. I believe that site explains laws in the United States. It probably varies somewhat by jurisdiction, so I expect it would depend on who owns the website and where they are based.
To tag along with this, I remember this becoming an issue 10 or 15 years ago and a lot of the big lyrics websites were forced to reach licensing agreements with the songwriting groups like ASCAP and BMI (they collect and distribute royalties on behalf of the writers). I think a couple sites tried going to court to claim fair use but lost pretty quickly. That’s pretty established law going back to the earliest days of music publishing. Just because they were publishing online instead of printing up songbooks doesn’t mean the laws change.
From the article, it doesn’t look like these websites should be legal. Musixmatch also doesn’t fall under fair use, I would think.
