LAION wins copyright infringement lawsuit in German court – TechnoLlama
peter.suber's bookmarks 2024-10-13
Summary:
"Copyright AI nerds have been eagerly awaiting a decision in the German case of Kneschke v LAION (previous blog post about the case here), and yesterday we got a ruling (text of the decision in German here, courtesy of Mirko Brüß). In short, LAION was successful in its defence against claims for copyright infringement....
LAION did not contest that a copy had been made. The main legal argument presented by the defendants was that they were in compliance with the exception for text and data mining present in German law, which is a transposition of Article 3 of the 2019 Digital Single Market Directive, and as such they are allowed to make a reproduction of a work for the purpose of extracting information....
The court argued that while LAION had been used by commercial organisations, the dataset itself had been released to the public free of charge, and no evidence was presented that any commercial body had control over its operations. Therefore, the dataset is non-commercial and for scientific research. So LAION’s actions are covered by section 60d of the German Copyright Act (Art 3 DSM), and consequently there is no copyright infringement. Case dismissed...."