November 20, 2024 – In a series of legal actions, the German music copyright agency GEMA and the Indian news agency ANI have filed lawsuits against OpenAI, accusing the company of using their content without permission to train its artificial intelligence models.
On the 13th and 18th of this month, respectively, GEMA and ANI, also known as the Asia International News (India) Service, submitted their complaints to local courts. GEMA claims to be the world’s first collective management organization to sue a generative AI system provider. Representing the copyrights of over two million music rights holders globally, it stands as one of the largest musical works authors’ associations.
GEMA alleges that OpenAI’s chatbot outputs lyrics from music it represents when given simple prompts, indicating that the company used related music material without authorization during AI training. Tobias Holzmüller, CEO of GEMA, stated, “Our members’ songs are not free raw materials for the business models of generative AI system providers. Anyone who wants to use these songs must obtain a license and pay the authors fairly.”
Meanwhile, ANI, one of India’s leading news agencies, has initiated legal action against OpenAI for copyright infringement, marking the first such legal move by an Indian media outlet. ANI not only accuses OpenAI of unlawfully using its content for training but also believes that the fabricated “hallucinated” interview content generated by OpenAI’s chatbot poses a real threat to its reputation. The dissemination of fake news, ANI argues, can also lead to public disorder.
