Source: JD Supra

JD Supra analyzes the historic judgment delivered on December 10, 2025, by the Higher Regional Court of Hamburg in the case of Robert Kneschke v. LAION e.V. (Ref.: 5 U 104/24). The appellate court confirmed the lower court's decision, dismissing a photographer's claim that the non-profit organization LAION violated his copyright by including a watermarked image in a massive dataset used to train AI models. The court ruled that the reproduction of the image for the creation of the LAION-5B dataset is legally permitted under German copyright exceptions for "text and data mining" (TDM).

The court's reasoning centered on Section 44b of the Copyright Act (UrhG), which allows the TDM of publicly accessible works unless the rights holder has explicitly reserved such use in a machine-readable format. In this case, although the image was subject to terms of service prohibiting automated scraping, the court held that such restrictions were not sufficiently "machine-readable" to constitute a valid opt-out. Additionally, the court confirmed that LAION qualifies as a "research organization" under Section 60d UrhG, operating for non-commercial scientific purposes.

This decision is seen as a major win for the AI research community in Europe, providing legal certainty for the creation of large-scale open-source datasets. It also highlights the high threshold required for rights holders to protect their works from scraping via standard terms of use. However, the court granted leave for a further appeal to the Federal Court of Justice, indicating that the debate over the balance between creator rights and technological innovation is not yet over in the German legal landscape.