Landmark decision by the District Court of Hamburg on text and data mining exceptions (Kneschke v. Laion)

The District Court of Hamburg dismissed a photographer's claim, ruling that there was no copyright infringement due to the limitation of copyright to text and data mining for scientific purposes. 

What was the case about?

A photographer (“Plaintiff”) filed a lawsuit against the nonprofit organisation, LAION aimed at promoting research in the field of AI by providing open datasets for training purposes. This resulted in a dataset consisting of nearly six billion image-text pairs. One of these six billion images belonged to the Plaintiff who had uploaded his picture to a stock photo site. The terms of use of this stock photo site, however, stated that images may not be used for “automated programs.” LAION used the Plaintiff’s image from this site and included it in the training dataset. The Plaintiff claimed a copyright infringement, arguing that none of the limitations to copyright (such as those for text and data mining, “TDM”) applied.

For more information, please contact Simon Hembt. 

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