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IPKat-approved Laion |
A few days ago, the District Court of Hamburg delivered what appears to be the first judgment in Europe on the construction and application of the national transpositions of the text and data mining (TDM) exceptions found in Arts. 3 and 4 of the DSM Directive (310 O 227/23).
A fundamental aspect of the decision that deserves greater attention is that the analysis of the court is incomplete. As such, it may not represent good guidance for either concerned stakeholders or other courts in Europe faced with questions of unlicensed TDM and subsequent AI training.
Specifically (and likely because of how the plaintiff photographer pleaded the case), the court failed to consider that the TDM exception for scientific research would not cover all of LAION’s activities as described in the judgment itself, notably the circumstance – following the completion of TDM activities – that LAION made the resulting dataset publicly available for anyone to use and for any purpose, including commercial AI training.
The scope of TDM exceptions: extraction and reproduction
Like the corresponding EU provisions, the German sections considered by the court are exceptions to specified restricted acts under copyright and other rights:
- Like Art. 5(1) of the InfoSoc Directive, Section 44a UrhG (Temporary acts of reproduction), which was held inapplicable, only encompasses acts of reproduction;
- Like Art. 4 of the DSM Directive, Section 44b UrhG (TDM), whose applicability in the case at hand – while doubtful – was deemed not necessary to decide, only encompasses acts of reproduction and, insofar as the sui generis database right is concerned, extraction;
- Like Art. 3 of the DSM Directive, Section 60d UrhG (TDM for scientific research purposes) is limited to acts of extraction and reproduction.
The image below shows the results of a LAION dataset search for ‘blue cat’:
The copyright relevance of subsequent restricted acts
Assuming that the German court was correct in holding that the German equivalent of Art. 3 DSM Directive would apply to LAION’s own TDM activities, following their conclusion, LAION performed restricted acts that are not within the scope of any TDM exception (whether Art. 3 or 4 of the DSM Directive).
By creating a dataset and making it available to the public, LAION performed a (1) potential new act of reproduction (by uploading copies of protected content on the dataset) and (2) an act of communication/making available to the public (by making the dataset publicly accessible on the internet).
(1) New act of reproduction
Insofar as reproduction is concerned, the circumstance that it appears possible to search the LAION dataset and retrieve full-size pictures means that new actionable acts of reproduction under Art. 2 of the InfoSoc Directive (as transposed into German law) might have been performed.
(2) Act of communication/making available to the public
Turning to communication/making available to the public, this is engaged by both the public display, on the LAION dataset, of the pictures and the provision of links to third-party websites where the pictures are hosted.
In sum
In light of the foregoing: one thing is the undertaking of restricted acts covered by applicable TDM exceptions; another is the doing of further restricted acts, including those that are propaedeutic to the subsequent training and offering of AI models.
Hence, statements of the court like “whether the dataset … is also used by commercial companies for the training or further development of their AI systems is irrelevant because the research of commercial companies is still research” are problematic in that they unduly simplify and overall misunderstand both (i) the steps needed to transition from LAION’s own TDM activities to the subsequent training and offering of AI models and (ii) their relevance and treatment under copyright.
While the AI Act, as the court noted, recognizes the relevance of TDM to AI training, it does not say – as the court appeared to imply instead – that TDM is synonymous with AI training or that everything in-between TDM and AI training is covered by Arts. 3 or 4 of the DSM Directive.
Other aspects
The judgment is problematic for other reasons too.
Conflating the TDM exception with AI training reveals another problem in the reasoning, While the court correctly considered the need to construe the TDM exception in light of the three-step test (as per Art. 7(2) of the DSM Directive), it erred when it used it to interpret the TDM exception in such a way as to allow the blanket training of AI models, opining that otherwise the TDM exception in Art. 3 would become devoid of meaning. The three-step test in Art. 7(2) is relevant to construe inter alia Arts. 3 and 4 therein, not to include within their scope the doing of additional acts restricted by copyright that a research organization or others can perform.
While there is little doubt, as also noted by the court, that when the TDM exceptions were adopted in 2019, AI training was already understood to be a possible application of TDM, it was an undue simplification on the side of the court not to consider that restricted acts other than those covered by the TDM provisions would be performed in the scenario at hand.
The circumstance that the plaintiff’s watermarked preview photograph was publicly available on a website does not mean that it could be used by anyone for any purpose. Opining otherwise would also be contrary to the characterization of copyright’s exclusive rights as being preventive in nature and the prohibition of exhaustion of the right of communication/making available to the public (Art. 3(3) of the InfoSoc Directive).
Conclusion
The Hamburg decision offers some valuable guidance regarding TDM and AI training, including observations – like those concerning rights reservation – that might prove helpful in future cases.
That said, the judgment appears incomplete in some key respects and for failing to address – let alone answer – the question of the relationship between TDM and AI training. Above all, it is flawed in the part in which it does not acknowledge the limitations in the scope of Art. 3 of the DSM Directive (as well as Art. 4 therein). Further guidance is therefore needed in order to tackle the interplay between TDM and AI training correctly.