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Enforcement or court caseMediaFrontierGermanyReported

Hamburg court rules LAION’s dataset building is lawful research text and data mining

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Source: Lausen Rechtsanwälte: LG Hamburg, Kneschke v. LAION e.V.Also reported by WIPO Lex: judgment text

The Hamburg Regional Court dismissed photographer Robert Kneschke’s claim against LAION e.V. on 27 September 2024 (case 310 O 227/23). It held that downloading his photo to build the LAION-5B image-text dataset, which links to more than 5 billion images, was covered by the text and data mining exception for scientific research in Section 60d of the German Copyright Act. In remarks that do not bind later courts, it said a reservation written in a website’s terms of use can count as machine-readable, and it left the legality of training AI models on such data undecided.

Why it matters

Non-profit groups compiling AI training datasets in Germany gained a court ruling that research text and data mining covers their work, while commercial training was left open.

When
27 Sep 2024
ID
WTA-N-2024-0065
Where
Germany
Who
LAION, Hamburg Regional Court; Robert Kneschke
Topics
Copyright
Authority
Hamburg Regional Court
Target
LAION e.V.
Action
ruling: claim dismissed
Status
decided · Enforcement ledger

Summary by wheresthe.ai, from Lausen Rechtsanwälte and the reporting credited above. We could not open the primary document, so it is marked Reported. Checked against the source on 9 Oct 2026.

Read the original at Lausen Rechtsanwälte

Source copy: download the page as saved on 18 Oct 2026 (PDF). Also held by the Internet Archive.

Next stop on this Storyline: What happened nextMunich court rules ChatGPT’s memorised song lyrics infringe copyright (GEMA v OpenAI)

Cite this story

WTA-N-2024-0065: “Hamburg court rules LAION’s dataset building is lawful research text and data mining.” wheresthe.ai, 27 Sep 2024. https://wheresthe.ai/d/de-hamburg-court-laion-tdm-ruling-2024-09/ (source: Lausen Rechtsanwälte: LG Hamburg, Kneschke v. LAION e.V.).

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