Did the court find that AI training constitutes “reproduction” under German copyright law?
Yes. Following Article 2 InfoSoc Directive, the court held that a reproduction exists “in any form and by any means.” Even a fixation through numerical probability values qualifies, as long as the work can later be perceived through technical means. The court considered the model parameters to embody the protected expression.
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Did the court consider any other exemptions or implied consents by the authors?
No. The court stated that training AI models is not an ordinary or expected use of a work to which authors have implicitly consented. The acts were therefore unlicensed. Furthermore, the court found that the use was not justified by quotation, parody or similar limitations to copyright.
Who did the court find to be responsible for the AI outputs?
The court determined that responsibility lies with OpenAI. The company selected the training data, built and operated the system, and determined its architecture. User prompts merely trigger the model’s internal processes and do not create independent liability.
- LLMs and plagiarism: a case study - lcamtuf
- Technical Issues of Separation in Function Cells and Value Cells - Richard P. Gabriel, Kent M. Pitman
- I BUILT A FULLY AUTOMATIC MANSPLAINER - Yannic Kilcher
- Introduction to Small Language Models: The Complete Guide for 2026 - Vinod Chugani - "complete"? :P
- Anthropic Study: AI Coding Assistance Reduces Developer Skill Mastery by 17% - Steef-Jan Wiggers
- Selected Talks - Gregor Kiczales
- Why Black Boxes Are So Hard To Reuse - Gregor Kiczales
- Data Warehousing: Aggregating Data for Analysis - mentions "The Data Warehouse Toolkit"
- Pretty-Printing, Converting List to Linear Structure - Ira Goldstein
- Sturgeon's Law
"ninety percent of everything is crap"
- Money creation in the modern economy - Michael McLeay, Amar Radia and Ryland Thomas of the Bank’s Monetary Analysis Directorate
- Money creation in the modern economoy - Quarterly Bulletin - Bank of England
- Intoducing Gloat and Glojure - Ingy
- Piledriving the GenAI Grift with Nikhil Suresh - Last Week in AWS
- Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters - Ursula K. Le Guin
To the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks, from the heart. My family, my agents, my editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as my own, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice in accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who’ve been excluded from literature for so long — my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for fifty years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.
Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.
- I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again - Nikhil Suresh
- I Will Fucking Dropkick You If You Use That Spreadsheet - Nikhil Suresh