Copyright AI nerds have been eagerly awaiting a decision in the German case of Kneschke v LAION (previous blog post about the case here), and yesterday we got a ruling (text of the decision in German here, courtesy of Mirko Brüß). In short, LAION was successful in its defence against claims for copyright infringement.
The case was brought by German photographer Robert Kneschke, who found that some of his photographs had been included in the LAION dataset. He requested the images to be removed, but LAION argued that they had no images, only links to where the images could be found online. Kneschke argued that the process of collecting the dataset had included making copies of the images to extract information, and that this amounted to copyright infringement. He sued in the regional court of Hamburg, arguing that copies had been made of the photographs in question, and that these did not fall under the exceptions present in German copyright law in sections 44a (temporary copies), 44b (text and data mining), and 60d (text and data mining for scientific purposes).
LAION did not contest that a copy had been made. The main legal argument presented by the defendants was that they were in compliance with the exception for text and data mining present in German law, which is a transposition of Article 3 of the 2019 Digital Single Market Directive, and as such they are allowed to make a reproduction of a work for the purpose of extracting information. The defendants argued that they were indeed covered by the exceptions contained in 44a, 44b, and 60d. The court decided that LAION was a research organisation and as such was covered by section 60d of the act (Art 3 of the DSM Directive), so it did not need to consider the defence in section 44a, but it considered that the copy was not a temporary copy, so now we have the first test of that theory. Regarding text and data mining for scientific purposes, the court argues: