AI Litigation Case Law Tracker

The background of this case was the use of images by a photographer in a database, which was intended to be used for AI training. The defendant, a non-profit organization for AI research, created a publicly available dataset that can be used to train generative AI. This dataset contains over 5.85 billion image-text pairs collected from publicly accessible sources on the internet. The defendant obtained one of the plaintiff's photos by downloading it from a stock photo agency website that prohibits automatic “downloading” or “scraping” in its terms of use. The plaintiff, a photographer, claimed that the use of one of his photos in this project infringed his copyright. After the Regional Court Hamburg dismissed the photographers claim based on the text- and data mining (TDM) exception of Section 60d Germany Copyright Act (UrhG), which was confirmed by the Higher Regional Court of Justice, the case is now pending at the German Federal Court of Justice.