Germany: Munich Regional Court issued ruling on lawsuit concerning alleged copyright infringement of song lyrics by AI systems

On 11 November 2025, the 42nd Civil Chamber of the Munich Regional Court largely upheld GEMA’s claims for injunctive relief and damages against two OpenAI group companies. GEMA, a collecting society, argued that lyrics by nine German songwriters had been memorised by OpenAI’s language models and reproduced in chatbot outputs, thereby infringing copyright exploitation rights. OpenAI maintained that its models consist of learned parameters rather than stored data, that users are responsible for generated outputs, and that any reproductions were covered by the text and data mining limitation (Section 44b UrhG) or the incidental inclusion exception (Section 57 UrhG). The court found that the lyrics were embedded in the models and reproduced in chatbot responses, constituting infringements of exploitation rights under Article 2 of the InfoSoc Directive and Section 16 of the German Copyright Act. It held that text and data mining limitations apply only to reproductions required for data analysis, not to reproductions incorporated within a model. The defence of incidental inclusion was dismissed on the basis that the lyrics were not incidental within the dataset. The court further determined that no consent from rights holders could be implied, as model training did not qualify as an expected use. Responsibility for the infringing outputs was attributed to OpenAI, given its control over the models, training data, and content generation architecture. Claims concerning personality rights arising from the incorrect attribution of altered lyrics were rejected.