ChatGPT strikes a sour note with German musicians

Above the clouds, freedom knows no limits. That was German folk singer Reinhard Mey’s view, at least, in his 1974 hit song Über die Wolken. On Tuesday, a Munich court grounded the US tech giant Open AI with a bump, thanks in part to Mey’s folksy feel-good number.

In a landmark ruling, the company was found guilty of taking Mey a little too literally, breaking copyright law by using hit song lyrics to train its ChatGPT software without first buying a licence.

The case was taken by music rights organisation Gema, the local equivalent of Ireland’s Imro, and could have consequences far beyond Germany’s borders.

Gema – with membership that includes musicians, composers and lyricists – took the test case using 10 popular German hits it said had been used to train ChatGPT.

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Other songs incorporated into the complaint included Atemlos (Breathless), where performer Helene Fischer sings that “all I want is great freedom”.

Lawyers for Open AI denied that ChatGPT played free and easy with the fifth most successful song in German pop history.

ChatGPT language models did not store or copy specific training data, OpenAI lawyers argued, but reflected what they had learned based on an entire training set.

What’s more, they argued, the lyrics would only be generated if prompted by the user. The company’s “guns don’t kill people, people do” defence didn’t convince Munich regional court.

It said OpenAI had infringed Gema member copyright by allowing ChatGPT to memorise and then reproduce lyrics without a licence.

The court has ordered OpenAI to pay undisclosed damages but the San Francisco tech company has vowed to appeal the ruling. Gema hopes the case will conclude in its favour as “the first landmark AI ruling in Europe”.

Gema chief executive, Tobias Holzmüller, warned OpenAI and other AI companies against viewing the internet as a “self-service store”. Human creative achievements, he said, “are not free templates”. The AI colossus can, in other words, be toppled.

Or, in the words of Reinhard Mey: “What once seemed big and important is suddenly inane and small.”