{"id":8503,"date":"2025-11-11T18:22:48","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T18:22:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/gema-wins-ai-music-copyright-case-against-openai-and-chatgpt\/"},"modified":"2025-11-11T18:22:48","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T18:22:48","slug":"gema-wins-ai-music-copyright-case-against-openai-and-chatgpt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/gema-wins-ai-music-copyright-case-against-openai-and-chatgpt\/","title":{"rendered":"GEMA Wins AI Music Copyright Case Against OpenAI and ChatGPT"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n\tBERLIN \u2014 The first serious European court decision on AI and music is in \u2013 and rightsholders won. On Nov. 11, the Munich Regional Court ruled that OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT software infringed copyrights to compositions represented by GEMA, the German collective management organization. The judge ordered OpenAI to pay damages but did not say what they might be.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe OpenAI case involved song lyrics \u2013 in particular, compositions by star singer Herbert Gr\u00f6nemeyer, among others \u2013 which the court found were used to train ChatGPT without seeking a license, and then made those lyrics available in response to prompts by users \u00a0<\/p>\n

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\n\t\u201cThe Internet is not some kind of self-service buffet and creative achievements by human beings are not simply templates for use free of charge, GEMA CEO Tobias Holzm\u00fcller<\/strong> said in a statement. \u201cToday we have set a precedent that both protects and clarifies the rights of creative copyright holders: Operators of AI tools such as ChatGPT must also comply with copyright law.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAlthough this case only involved song lyrics, the reasoning behind the decision would apply in other cases, and it would do so throughout Europe. OpenAI argued, unsuccessfully, that it was protected under the Europe-wide exception to copyright for text and data mining. The company could appeal the decision.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThis is the first of two key lawsuits GEMA filed in 2024 and 2025 \u2013 the other being its case against Suno. Together, the two cases put GEMA at the forefront of the issue. On Nov. 4, the Danish CMO, KODA, also sued Suno. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tGEMA has said in the past that it does not want to prevent generative AI companies from doing business. Rather, it wants to make them license the rights to the compositions GEMA represents \u2013 and create a structure that would enable that on a mass scale. This would not involve recordings \u2013 only songs \u2014 and any licensing plan of that nature would have to work differently in the US, where publishers license their own mechanical rights. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe decision comes less than two weeks after Universal Music Group announced that it had settled its U.S. lawsuit with the generative AI company Udio. The two other major labels have not settled and all three are still suing Suno. \u00a0<\/p>\n


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BERLIN \u2014 The first serious European court decision on AI and music is in \u2013 and rightsholders won. On Nov. 11, the Munich Regional Court ruled that OpenAI\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8504,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[294,1222,429,4366,593,2870,882],"class_list":["post-8503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-case","tag-chatgpt","tag-copyright","tag-gema","tag-music","tag-openai","tag-wins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}