Source: Bird & Bird

Bird & Bird analyzes the decisive ruling delivered by the Higher Regional Court of Hamburg on December 15, 2025, in the high-profile case of Kneschke v. LAION e.V. The court confirmed the first-instance decision, holding that the creation of the massive LAION-5B dataset, which involved downloading and analyzing a photographer's copyrighted image, was permitted under Section 60d of the German Copyright Act (UrhG). This section implements the EU DSM Directive's exception for text and data mining (TDM) for scientific research purposes. The judges reasoned that the copying of the image was technically necessary to extract correlations between the image and its text description, a fundamental step in training multi-modal AI models.

The judgment is particularly significant because it clarifies the definition of "scientific research" in the context of AI development. The court rejected the plaintiff's argument that the subsequent use of the dataset by commercial entities should invalidate the research privilege of the non-profit creator, LAION. By validating the lawful basis for scraping data to build training sets, the Hamburg court has provided legal certainty for European research institutions and non-profit organizations, distinguishing this activity from commercial model exploitation while affirming the robust scope of TDM exceptions in Germany.