The idea of using the entire internet as a basis for AI training data represents an unimaginable technical effort with questionable benefits for the quality of the respective models, yet there are developers of generative AI systems who claim to have done precisely that – naturally without asking permission of the rights holders of the media content used, let alone sharing any profits with them. Whether all content freely available online is actually used in AI training, or ‘only’ a large proportion of it: a court – namely the Munich Regional Court – has now clarified for the first time that AI developers demonstrably and systematically infringe applicable copyright law when training and operating their products. The lawsuit was brought by the German collecting society for musical works, GEMA, against the tech giant OpenAI and the provider of the no less market-dominant AI product Suno AI, which is used for the fully automated production of musical pieces via prompting. A ruling has already been handed down in the OpenAI case, with the court ruling in favour of the creators and rights holders. In the case of Suno AI, the verdict is still pending. In any event, the international reactions from politics, the press and the industry show that the GEMA lawsuits are an important milestone in the fight for the recognition and value of human creative work.
Dr Kai Welp is GEMA’s Chief Legal Officer. In this episode of Digitalgespräch, the copyright and media lawyer discusses the two internationally high-profile lawsuits that GEMA filed in the winter of 2024/25 against the AI developers behind ChatGPT and Suno AI, and outlines the arguments and evidence he and his team presented during the proceedings. He provides insights into the reasoning and objectives behind the lawsuits and contextualises the significance of the proceedings at an international level. Together with hosts Marlene Görger and Petra Gehring, Welp discusses what fair agreements between creatives and AI developers might look like, what values and guiding principles GEMA advocates for artificial intelligence in the creative industry – and why he is confident that AI will not necessarily displace human creative work.
Episode 77 of Digitalgespräch, feat. Kai Welp of GEMA, 31 March 2026
Further informationen:
GEMA’s AI Charter: https://www.gema.de/en/news/ai-and-music/ai-charter
Results of the study commissioned by GEMA and SACEM discussed in the podcast: https://www.gema.de/en/news/ai-study
all episodes of Digitalgespräch
The podcast is in German. At the moment there is no English version or transcript available.