COURT DATE SET FOR TRIAL AGAINST LAION E.V. FOR COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENTWith courtesy of ROBERT KNESCHKE
Original post:
Gerichtstermin im Verfahren gegen LAION e.V. wegen Urheberrechtsverletzung steht fest – Alltag eines Fotoproduzenten
My lawsuit against the German association LAION e.V., which among other things provides training datasets for AI applications, has attracted a lot of attention worldwide.
Since there are also many regular enquiries about the current status of the case, here is a short update.
You can read about the background of my lawsuit in detail in my blog articles here and here.
In short, several of my photos are in the “LAION 5B” dataset. Using a specific photo as an example, I have requested an injunction and information about the scope of use, as in my opinion the use of the photo for training the dataset constitutes a copyright-relevant reproduction.
The LAION e.V. association naturally sees things differently, as you will easily understand from reading in the two blog articles mentionned above. Therefore, the only option left to us had been to take legal action.
Timeline of the lawsuit:
27.04.2023: Action filed with the Hamburg Regional Court
28.06.2023: Order of the Hamburg Regional Court, the association can indicate readiness to defend and reply to the action
01.08.2023: LAION e.V. files statement of defence
20.09.2023: Statement by my lawyer on the statement of defence
25.04.2024 at 15:00: Court hearing before the Hamburg Regional Court
The Hamburg Regional Court has therefore scheduled a court hearing in about six months’ time, at which further oral proceedings will be held on the complaint. The proceedings are open to the public. Here is the current summary of the case by SLD, the law firm representing me.
Other current lawsuits in the AI field [Links below are provided to English sources]
However, I am not the only one who is upset that his copyrighted works are being exploited by AI companies without demand or payment.
- In the US, there is currently this class action lawsuit by three artists against Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt.
- US comedian Sarah Silverman, along with two other authors, is currently suing chatGPT operator OpenAI and Facebook parent Meta for the use of some of her books in AI training data.
- This lawsuit is also ongoing against Google for the unauthorised use of data for AI training.
- Already known for some time is the lawsuit of the image agency Getty Images against Stability AI for their use of images in the AI training dataset.
Translated with a little help from Deepl Translate
Resources:
- This article provides a summary of the AI lawsuits in the USA
- Recording of a webinar with Sebastian Deubelli, Robert Knechke lawyer, is availble in the Login Area of the CEPIC website
