On Friday, the Hamburg Regional Court dismissed a photographer’s lawsuit against the non-profit research network Laion over the use of a copyrighted image. Laion provides a publicly accessible database with nearly 6 billion image-text pairs that can be used to train AI systems. One of the images in this database belonged to the plaintiff, who sought a court order to prohibit its use. The issue presented to the court was whether the text and data mining exceptions in § 44b UrhG and § 60d UrhG justify using copyrighted works for AI training. The court seems to agree with Laion’s position (Ruling from September 27, 2024 – 310 O 227/23) and in the first instance, the photographer has now lost the case before the Hamburg Regional Court .
Nevertheless, the legal dispute is not about whether the image can generally be used for AI training, but whether Laion was allowed to download it to compare it with the image description for its database purposes. Downloading such an image constitutes a reproduction of a protected work, which requires the permission of the copyright holder. However, the Hamburg court considers this use to be justified by the text and data mining exception in § 60d UrhG. This provision permits the use of copyrighted works for scientific purposes, particularly for text and data mining, without infringing on the copyright holder’s rights. Text and data mining refer to converting unstructured data into structured formats to identify meaningful patterns and generate new insights, a process that relies on vast data collections.
The Hamburg court believes that Laion’s comparison of the image and its description falls under this exception. It views this process as an analysis to identify correlations between image content and its description, which is considered a privileged scientific purpose. The fact that the data was later used for AI training does not change this assessment, as the original purpose of data collection was for scientific research.
The court also touched on the pressing question of whether using such data for commercial purposes would be permissible under § 44b UrhG if the copyright holder includes a usage restriction in machine-readable language alongside their work. In this case, the photo agency from which Laion obtained the image had posted such a restriction in “natural language” on its website. The court hinted that such restrictions in natural language might be considered machine-readable if modern AI technologies can comprehend them.