In a landmark decision, a German district court recently decided
that copying images to create a data set that can potentially be
used for training generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems
does not infringe German copyright law. Robert Kneschke v.
Large Scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network, Case No.
GRUR-RS 2024, 25458 (Hamburg District Court Sept. 27, 2024)
The nonprofit Large Scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network
(LAION) created a data set containing 5.85 billion image-text pairs
publicly available on the internet. This data set can be used to
train generative AI systems. For the creation of the data set,
LAION accessed a preexisting data set with uniform resource
locators (URLs) referencing images and their descriptions. First,
LAION extracted the URLs and downloaded the referenced images,
including a copyrighted work by photographer Robert Kneschke, even
though a reservation of use against web scraping was declared on a
subpage of the website.
