Producer 🧠# ChatGPT, 🧠# OpenAI, accused of copyright infringement on some books
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| Source: Mastodon | Original article
OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has been sued in a German court for alleged copyright infringement involving several children’s books published in Germany. The plaintiff – a consortium of German publishers led by the rights‑holder of the titles – claims that OpenAI harvested the full text and illustrations of the books without permission and used them to train its large‑language model. According to the complaint, the model now reproduces passages and images that are “substantially identical” to the original works when users request summaries or story‑generation prompts, violating German copyright law’s exclusive reproduction and distribution rights.
The case builds on the litigation we reported on 31 March 2026, when Penguin sued OpenAI over a German edition of a classic children’s story that the chatbot reproduced verbatim. Together with recent actions by Britannica and other content owners, the German suit underscores a growing backlash against the opaque data‑collection practices that underpin generative AI. Legal experts warn that if courts deem the training‑data extraction unlawful, AI developers could face injunctions, hefty damages and a forced overhaul of how they source material for model training.
OpenAI has not yet commented on the German filing, but the company has previously defended its methods as “fair use” under U.S. law and has begun negotiating licensing agreements with some publishers. The outcome of the German trial will likely influence the European Union’s enforcement of the Digital Services Act and could prompt new industry standards for data licensing. Stakeholders should watch for the court’s ruling, any settlement talks, and whether OpenAI adjusts its training pipeline to accommodate stricter copyright compliance across the EU.
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