Germany: Hamburg District Court issued ruling in Kneschke v LAION permitting text and data mining of publicly available images to build free databases for training artificial intelligence

On 27 September 2024, the Hamburg District Court of Germany ruled that LAION, a non-profit organisation, did not infringe copyright law by building databases for the purpose of training artificial intelligence using images obtained through text and data mining (TDM) of publicly available images. The court first found that the instance of TDM was an example of TDM for scientific research purposes, given that LAION is a non-profit organisation, the dataset created was publicly available, and that the database was published for free and expressly non-commercial purposes. Second, the court found that considering the activity of LAION as TDM for scientific research meant that it fell under Article 3 of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (CDSM), which provides an exception for TDM used for scientific research purposes.