In a landmark judgment with far reaching ramifications, a German court recently held that the copying of images by Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network (LAION) – a nonprofit organization that provides datasets, tools and models to liberate machine learning research – did not infringe copyright law. The Kneschke v. LAION case, heard by the Hamburg Regional Court, centered on LAION’s automatic downloading of images, including a copyrighted work by photographer Robert Kneschke, for AI training purposes. In 2021, LAION, based in Hamburg, automatically downloaded images from the internet, including Kneschke’s photo from Bigstock, to create a dataset (LAION 5B) containing image-text pairs for training AI. Kneschke claimed LAION infringed his copyright by copying his image without permission to create a dataset that linked images with descriptive text. LAION had downloaded the photo from a licensed website to check if it matched the description using its software.

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