- Court: Landgericht (Regional Court) of Hamburg
- Date: 29 September 2024
- Case number: 310 O 227/23
- Parties: Robert Kneschke vs. LAION e.V.
A. Facts
On April 27, 2023, the claimant, photographer Robert Kneschke, filed a copyright infringement suit before the Regional Court of Hamburg against the defendant, LAION. The legal dispute arose from the defendant's incorporation of one of the claimant’s photographs in the training dataset for the AI model “LAION-5B”. The defendant is a German non-profit organisation that makes open-source artificial intelligence (AI) models and datasets. In the suit, the claimant sought an injunction against the use of that photo, and damages for copyright infringement.[1]
The defendant creates datasets that can be used to train generative AI and makes these datasets available to the public free of charge.[2] The dataset for LAION-5B contains descriptions of and hyperlinks to images publicly available on the Internet, including the claimant’s photograph.[3]
The claimant argued that the inclusion of his copyrighted photograph in LAION’s training datasets constituted unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted content.[4] To create the dataset, LAION had to record, download, and analyse the copyrighted image. The claimant alleged this conduct infringed his rights under Section 16 of the German Copyright Act.[5]
The claimant also argued that such reproduction was impermissible due to the presence of a valid reservation of use, made to prevent text and data mining (“TDM”) by automated bots.[6] This reservation was declared on the website www.bigstockphoto.com, a licensee of the claimant’s photograph.[7]
Furthermore, the claimant argued that the defendant pursues research for commercial purposes and could therefore not avail of the TDM exception under the German Copyright Act.[8] Section 60(d) of the German Copyright Act permits reproductions of copyrighted content through TDM for the purposes of scientific research by research organizations.[9]
The defendant admitted that the download of the photos constituted reproduction of copyrighted content,[10] but argued that the TDM exception to copyright infringement for scientific research did apply.[11] It also submitted that the alleged reservation against TDM for commercial use was not valid because it was not made by the claimant but by the operator of the website.[12] The defendant further argued that the reservation was not made in a valid machine-readable format, i.e., capable of being automatically processed by software.[13]
In its decision, the Hamburg-based Court dismissed the claimant’s suit and denied his request for an injunction.[14]
[1] Regional Court of Hamburg, 29 September 2024, 310 O 227/23, par. 31.
[2].Ibid, par. 5.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid, pars. 10 and 12.
[5] Ibid, par. 7.
[6] Ibid, par. 5: “RESTRICTIONS YOU MAY NOT: (...) 18. Use automated programs, applets, bots or the like to access the ... com website or any content thereon for any purpose, including, by way of example only, downloading Content, indexing, scraping or caching any content on the website.”
[7] Ibid, pars. 8 and 16; Section 44b of the German Copyright Act allows the copyright owner to reserve their rights, provided that they do so in a machine-readable format.
[8] Ibid, pars. 17 and 21.
[9] Ibid, par. 110.
[10] Ibid, par. 35.
[11] Ibid, pars. 42 to 45.
[12] Ibid, par. 38.
[13] Ibid, par. 40.
[14] Ibid, pars. 1 and 130.
