Being an academic is a vocation. We are not in it for the money (hopefully), but mostly (hopefully) for the impact that we can make on our students’ and colleagues’ lives, as well as to contribute to the process of healthy law and policy-making. It is a job with lots of responsibility, joys, surprises and…
A few weeks ago, the Spanish Ministry of Culture released a legislative proposal aimed at introducing extended collective licensing (ECL) for the development of general-purpose AI models. The first of its kind, the “Draft Royal Decree to regulate the granting of extended collective licenses for the massive exploitation of works and other subject matter protected…
Introduction The interaction between the AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689) and the exceptions for text and data mining (TDM) in the CDSM Directive is one of the most important topics in EU copyright law today. One particularly controversial point of intersection is the AI Act’s attempt, through recital 106, to give extraterritorial effect to its copyright-related…
In the first part of this post on the Kneschke vs. LAION decision by the German Hamburg Regional Court (“Court”), we explored the Court’s key findings regarding the operational step in a generative AI model, and the decision on the exceptions for scientific research text and data mining (“TDM”) and temporary reproductions. Now, in this…
On September 27, 2024, the German Hamburg Regional Court (“Court”) issued the first ruling on reproductions of copyrighted content from the Internet made during the creation of an AI training data set – and on whether the copyright exceptions for text and data mining (“TDM”) provide statutory permission for such use (Landgericht Hamburg, 310 O…
Copyright is not averse to new technologies. Its history is intrinsically linked to technological development. At each stage, revisions, adjustments, and adaptations to the existing organizational and legal structure are necessary and ideally preceded by wide-ranging and informed debate. The same holds true for Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. And the interaction between copyright and AI…
The German Regional Court (Landgericht) of Hamburg handed down its judgment in the LAION case on 27 September 2024 (file no. 310 O 227/23, published in German here). The key points of the decision are as follows: The reproduction of works for the purpose of creating URL lists that can be used for artificial…
Now that the summer is formally over it is time for the third trimester of the 2024 roundup of EU copyright law. In this edition, we update you on what has happened between July and September 2024 in EU copyright law – all the way from the CJEU, through Advocate General (AG) Opinions, to important…
Large language models are built on scale. The bigger they are, the better they perform. The appetite for letters of these omnivorous readers is insatiable, so their literary diet must grow steadily if AI is to live up to its promise. If Samuel Johnson, in one of his famous Ramblers of 1751, grumbled about the…
Last week, the District Court of Hamburg, Germany, held a hearing in the first European case to examine the legality of using copyrighted works for the purpose of training generative AI models. The case centers on LAION e.V.’s (a German non-profit organization that builds widely used training datasets) download of an image by German photographer…
