Germany: Hanseatic Higher Regional Court upheld Hamburg Regional Court's judgment on lawfulness of use of photograph in AI training dataset

On 10 December 2025, the 5th Civil Senate of the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court dismissed an appeal against a Hamburg Regional Court judgment, holding that the use of a photograph in an Artificial Intelligence (AI) training dataset by an association was lawful. The case concerned the creation of a publicly available image–text dataset, used to train generative AI models, which involved temporarily downloading the photograph from a photo agency website to compare it with descriptive data. The Court ruled that the use was permitted under the text and data mining exception in Section 44b of the German Copyright Act, which provides an exception for text and data mining, as the usage restriction on the agency’s website was not machine-readable as required by law, and therefore not legally effective. It further held that the activity was independently justified under the scientific research exception for text and data mining of copyrighted works in Section 60d of the Act. The ruling found that the dataset creation constituted a systematic, verifiable process aimed at future knowledge acquisition and attributable to applied research, notwithstanding the possibility of subsequent commercial use and in the absence of decisive private-sector influence.