Phoronix reports on "an exciting post-Christmas patch series out on the Linux kernel mailing list" proposing "a new runtime standby ABI that is similar in nature to the 'Modern Standby' functionality found with Microsoft Windows..." Modern Standby is a low-power mode on Windows 11 for letting systems remain connected to the network and appear "sleeping" but will allow for instant wake-up for notifications, music playback, and other functionality. The display is off, the network remains online, and background tasks can wake-up the system if needed with Microsoft Modern Standby...

"This series introduces a new runtime standby ABI to allow firing Modern Standby firmware notifications that modify hardware appearance from userspace without suspending the kernel," [according to the email about the proposed patch series]. "This allows userspace to set the inactivity state of the device so that it looks like it is asleep (e.g., flashing the power button) while still being able to perform basic computations..."

Those interested can see the RFC patch series for the work in its current form, in particular the documentation patch outlines the proposed /sys/power/standby interface.

"In the age of Spotify and AI slop, tapes remind us what we're missing when we stop taking risks," writes author Janus Rose in an article for 404 Media. Here's an excerpt: There are lots of advantages to the cassette lifestyle. Unlike vinyl records, tapes are compact and super-portable, and unlike streaming, you never have to worry about a giant company suddenly taking them away from you. They can be easily duplicated, shared, and made into mixtapes using equipment you find in a junk shop. When I was a kid, the first music I ever owned were tapes I recorded from MTV with a Kids' Fisher Price tape recorder. I had no money, so I would listen to those tapes for hours, relishing every word Kim Gordon exhaled on my bootlegged copy of Sonic Youth's "Bull in the Heather." Just like back then, my rediscovery of cassettes has led me to start listening more intentionally and deeply, devoting more and more time to each record without the compulsion to hit "skip." Most of the cassettes I bought in Tokyo had music I probably never would have found or spent time with otherwise.

Getting reacquainted with tapes made me realize how much has been lost in the streaming era. Over the past two decades, platforms like Spotify co-opted the model of peer-to-peer filesharing pioneered by Napster and BitTorrent into a fully captured ecosystem. But instead of sharing, this ecosystem was designed around screen addiction, surveillance, and instant gratification -- with corporate middlemen and big labels reaping all the profits. Streaming seeks to virtually eliminate what techies like to call "user friction," turning all creative works into a seamless and unlimited flow of data, pouring out of our devices like water from a digital faucet. Everything becomes "Content," flattened into aesthetic buckets and laser-targeted by "perfect fit" algorithms to feed our addictive impulses. Thus the act of listening to music is transformed from a practice of discovery and communication to a hyper-personalized mood board of machine-optimized "vibes."

What we now call "AI Slop" is just a novel and more cynically efficient vessel for this same process. Slop removes human beings as both author and subject, reducing us to raw impulses -- a digital lubricant for maximizing viral throughput. Whether we love or hate AI Slop is irrelevant, because human consumers are not its intended beneficiaries. In the minds of CEOs like OpenAI's Sam Altman, we're simply components in a machine built to maintain and accelerate information flows, in order to create value for an insatiably wealthy investor class. [...]

Tapes and other physical media aren't a magic miracle cure for late-stage capitalism. But they can help us slow down and remember what makes us human. Tapes make music-listening into an intentional practice that encourages us to spend time connecting with the art, instead of frantically vibe-surfing for something that suits our mood from moment-to-moment. They reject the idea that the point of discovering and listening to music is finding the optimal collection of stimuli to produce good brain chemicals. More importantly, physical media reminds us that nothing good is possible if we refuse to take risks. You might find the most mediocre indie band imaginable. Or you might discover something that changes you forever. Nothing will happen if you play it safe and outsource all of your experiences to a content machine designed to make rich people richer.

After Anna's Archive published a massive scrape containing 86 million songs and metadata from Spotify, the streaming giant responded by disabling the nefarious accounts responsible. A spokesperson for Spotify told Recorded Future News that it "has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping."

"We've implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior," the spokesperson said. "Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy, and we are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights." The Record reports: The spokesperson added that Anna's Archive did not contact them before publishing the files. They also said it did not consider the incident a "hack" of Spotify. The people behind the leaked database systematically violated Spotify's terms by stream-ripping some of the music from the platform over a period of months, a spokesperson said. They did this through user accounts set up by a third party and not by accessing Spotify's business systems, they added.

Anna's Archive published a blog post about the cache this weekend, writing that while it typically focuses its efforts on text, its mission to preserve humanity's knowledge and culture "doesn't distinguish among media types." "Sometimes an opportunity comes along outside of text. This is such a case. A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation," they said. "This Spotify scrape is our humble attempt to start such a 'preservation archive' for music. Of course Spotify doesn't have all the music in the world, but it's a great start."

A group of activists has scraped Spotify's entire library, accessing 256 million rows of track metadata and 86 million audio files totaling roughly 300TB of data. The metadata has been released via Anna's Archive, a search engine for "shadow libraries" that previously focused on books.

Spotify described the activists as "anti-copyright extremists who've previously pirated content from YouTube and other platforms" and confirmed it is actively investigating the incident. The activists claim this represents "the world's first 'preservation archive' for music which is fully open" and covers "around 99.6% of listens."

They appear to have used Spotify's public web API to scrape the metadata and circumvented DRM to access audio files. Spotify insists that this is not a security breach affecting user data. Though the more pressing concern for the music industry may be AI training rather than pirate streaming services -- similar YouTube datasets have reportedly been used by unlicensed generative AI music services.

Microsoft's latest holiday ad for its Copilot AI assistant features a 30-second montage of users seamlessly syncing smart home lights to music, scaling recipes for large gatherings, and parsing HOA guidelines -- none of which the software can actually perform reliably when put to the test. The Verge methodically tested each prompt shown in the ad and found that Copilot repeatedly hallucinated interface elements that didn't exist, claimed to highlight on-screen buttons when it hadn't, and abandoned calculations midway through.

The smart home interface shown in the ad belongs to "Relecloud," a fictional company Microsoft uses in internal case studies. A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that both the HOA document and the inflatable reindeer photo were fabricated for the advertisement. The ad closes with Santa Claus asking Copilot why toy production is behind schedule.

Further reading: Talking To Windows' Copilot AI Makes a Computer Feel Incompetent.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Audio streaming platform SoundCloud has confirmed that outages and VPN connection issues over the past few days were caused by a security breach in which threat actors stole a database containing user information. The disclosure follows widespread reports over the past four days from users who were unable to access SoundCloud when connecting via VPN, with attempts resulting in the site displaying 403 "forbidden" errors.

In a statement shared with BleepingComputer, SoundCloud said it recently detected unauthorized activity involving an ancillary service dashboard and activated its incident response procedures. SoundCloud acknowledged that a threat actor accessed some of its data but said the exposure was limited in scope. [...] BleepingComputer has learned that the breach affects 20% of SoundCloud's users, which, based on publicly reported user figures, could impact roughly 28 million accounts. The company said it is confident that all unauthorized access to SoundCloud systems has been blocked and that there is no ongoing risk to the platform. "We understand that a purported threat actor group accessed certain limited data that we hold," SoundCloud told BleepingComputer. "We have completed an investigation into the data that was impacted, and no sensitive data (such as financial or password data) has been accessed. The data involved consisted only of email addresses and information already visible on public SoundCloud profiles."

"People in their teens and early 20s are increasingly turning to old school tech," reports the BBC, "in a bid to unplug from the online world." Amazon UK told BBC Scotland News that retro-themed products surged in popularity during its Black Friday event, with portable vinyl turntables, Tamagotchis and disposable cameras among their best sellers. Retailers Currys and John Lewis also said they had seen retro gadgets making a comeback with sales of radios, instant cameras and alarm clocks showing big jumps.

While some people scroll endlessly through Netflix in search of their next watch, 17-year-old Declan prefers the more traditional approach of having a DVD in his hands. He grew up surrounded by his gran's collection and later bought his own after visiting a shop with a friend. "The main selling point for me is the cases," he says. Streaming services like Netflix and Disney+ dominate the market but Declan says he values ownership. "It's nice to have something you own instead of paying for subscriptions all the time," he says. "If I lost access to streaming tomorrow, I'd still have my favourite movies ready to watch."

He admits DVDs are a "dying way of watching movies" but that makes them cheaper. "I think they're just cool, there's something authentic about having DVDs," he says. "These things are generations old, it's nice to have them available."
The BBC also writes that one 21-year-old likes the "deliberate artistry" of traditional-camera photography — and the nostalgic experience of using one. They interview a 20-year-old who says vinyl records have a "more authentic sound" — and he appreciates having the physical disc and jacket art.

And one 21-year-old even tracked down the handheld PlayStation Portable he'd used as a kid...

The Supreme Court appears inclined to side with Cox Communications in a major copyright case, suggesting that ISPs shouldn't be held liable for users' music piracy based solely on "mere knowledge," given the risk of forcing outages for universities, hospitals, and other large customers. The New York Times reports: Leading music labels and publishers who represent artists ranging from Bob Dylan to Beyonce sued Cox Communications in 2018, saying it had failed to terminate the internet connections of subscribers who had been repeatedly flagged for illegally downloading and distributing copyrighted music. At issue is whether providers like Cox can be held legally responsible and be required to pay steep damages -- a billion dollars or more -- if they know that customers are pirating the music but do not take sufficient steps to terminate their internet access.

Justices from across the ideological spectrum on Monday raised concerns about whether finding for the music industry could result in internet providers being forced to cut off access to large account holders such as hospitals and universities because of the illegal acts of individual users. "What is the university supposed to do in your view?" asked Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., a conservative, suggesting it would be difficult to track down bad actors without the risk of losing service campuswide. "I just don't see how it's workable at all."

"The internet is so amorphous," added Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal, saying that a single "customer" could represent tens of thousands of users, particularly in rural areas where an entire region might be considered a "customer." After nearly two hours of argument, a majority of justices seemed likely to side with Cox and to send the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit for review under a stricter standard. Several justices suggested the company's "mere knowledge" of the illegal downloads was not sufficient to hold Cox liable.

An EDM song by the British group Haven ran into trouble in October after it shared clips of upcoming song "I Run" on TikTok.

The song "was an overnight viral sensation online," writes Digital Music News — racking up millions of plays "even before it hit streaming services." (Although the Washington Post notes that "Record labels and TikTok users began questioning whether 'I Run' used an AI deepfake, modeled off British R&B singer Jorja Smith, for the vocals.")

Digital Music News picks up the story: The artist says he used his own voice to record the vocals, and then ran it through layers of processing and filtering to turn it into the female-sounding voice heard in the track. However, that filtering also included the use of the controversial genAI platform Suno — and that's what complicates things... [The article says later that Suno "is currently in the middle of a blockbuster lawsuit with the Big Three major labels over allegations of widespread copyright infringement of sound recordings used during the AI model training process."]

Meanwhile, the song was rapidly amassing listenership. It soared to #11 on the U.S. Spotify chart and #25 on Spotify globally. Videos using the song continued going viral on TikTok and Instagram, including one in which rapper Offset had apparently played the song during a Boiler Room set, which later turned out to be falsified. And then, as quickly as it appeared, "I Run" was taken down from streaming services, including Spotify and Apple Music. That was due, in part, to numerous takedown notices from The Orchard, the label to which Jorja Smith is signed, as well as the RIAA and IFPI. The takedown notices alleged various issues with the track, including the "misrepresentation" of another artist, as well as copyright infringement.

As a result, the song has also been withheld from the Billboard charts, including the Hot 100, on which it had been predicted to debut this week before the controversy. Billboard points out that it "reserves the right to withhold or remove titles from appearing on the charts that are known to be involved in active legal disputes related to copyright infringement that may extend to the deletion of such content on digital service providers."
The song itself has now been re-released with an all-human vocal track. But going forward will the music industry ever work with AI platforms? The Washington Post reports: "I Run" has taken off as record labels remain unsure of the extent to which they should welcome generative AI programs such as Suno or Udio into the industry. After the two AI music companies began growing in popularity, the three major labels — Sony Music, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group — filed lawsuits against Suno and Udio, claiming that the AI companies have used the labels' sound recordings to train their model.

Since then, UMG and Warnerhave reached agreementsto work with Udio, ending their litigation... It comes shortly after all three major labels licensed their catalogue to Klay, a music streaming start-up that allows users to adjust songs using artificial intelligence. Major licensing organizations such as ASCAP and BMI shared that they would register songs that were partially AI-generated — but not fully generated ones.

Haven appears to present an uncomfortable edge case. While some AI-generated songs that sound broadly like other artists have been allowed to remain on streaming platforms, the voice in "I Run" appears to have been deemed too duplicative for comfort.

Warner Music Group has reached a licensing deal with Suno that will let users create AI-generated music using the voices and likenesses of artists who opt in. WMG says participating artists will have "full control" over how their likeness and music are used. "These will be new creation experiences from artists who do opt in, which will open up new revenue streams for them and allow you to interact with them in new ways," Suno says, adding that users will be able to "build around" an artist's sounds "and ensure they get compensated." WMG is also dropping its previous lawsuit accusing Suno of scraping copyrighted material.

"Along with the licensing agreement, Suno is planning to use licensed music from WMG to build next-gen music generation models that it claims will surpass its flagship v5 model," adds The Verge. "It will also start requiring users to have a paid account to download songs starting next year, with each tier providing a specific number of downloads each month."

Further reading: First 'AI Music Creator' Signed by Record Label. More Ahead, or Just a Copyright Quandry?

An anonymous reader shares a report: As part of the settlement with Universal, Udio has amended its terms of service, and users can no longer download their outputs. This has AI music makers furious, and with good reason. Unfortunately, they have little recourse, as the contract they sign when creating a Udio account includes a waiver of the right to bring a class action.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Forbes: On November 20, at approximately 4 p.m. Eastern time, Napster held an online meeting for its shareholders; an estimated 700 of roughly 1,500 including employees, former employees and individual investors tuned in. That's when its CEO John Acunto told everyone he believed that the never-identified big investor — who the company had insisted put in $3.36 billion at a $12 billion valuation in January, which would have made it one of the year's biggest fundraises — was not going to come through.

In an email sent out shortly after, it told existing investors that some would get a bigger percentage of the company, due to the canceled shares, and went on to describe itself as a "victim of misconduct," adding that it was "assisting law enforcement with their ongoing investigations." As for the promised tender offer, which would have allowed shareholders to cash out, that too was called off. "Since that investor was also behind the potential tender, we also no longer believe that will occur," the company wrote in the email.

At this point it seems unlikely that getting bigger stakes in the business will make any of the investors too happy. The company had been stringing its employees and investors along for nearly a year with ever-changing promises of an impending cash infusion and chances to sell their shares in a tender offer that would change everything. In fact, it was the fourth time since 2022 they've been told they could soon cash out via a tender offer, and the fourth time the potential deal fell through. Napster spokesperson Gillian Sheldon said certain statements about the fundraise "were made in good faith based on what we understood at the time. We have since uncovered indications of misconduct that suggest the information provided to us then was not accurate."
The article notes America's Department of Justice has launched an investigation (in which Napster is not a target), while the Securities and Exchange Commission has a separate ongoing investigation from 2022 into Napster's scrapped reverse merger.

While Napster announced they'd been acquired for $207 million by a tech company named Infinite Reality, Forbes says that company faced "a string of lawsuits from creditors alleging unpaid bills, a federal lawsuit to enforce compliance with an SEC subpoena (now dismissed) and exaggerated claims about the extent of their partnerships with Manchester City Football Club and Google. The company also touted 'top-tier' investors who never directly invested in the firm, and its anonymous $3 billion investment that its spokesperson told Forbes in March was in "an Infinite Reality account and is available to us" and that they were 'actively leveraging' it..."

And by the end, "Napster appears to have been scrambling to raise cash to keep the lights on, working with brokers and investment advisors including a few who had previously gotten into trouble with regulators.... If it turns out that Napster knew the fundraise wasn't happening and it benefited from misrepresenting itself to investors or acquirees, it could face much bigger problems. That's because doing so could be considered securities fraud."

"Copilot Actions on Windows 11" is currently available in Insider builds (version 26220.7262) as part of Copilot Labs, according to a recent report, "and is off by default, requiring admin access to set it up."

But maybe it's off for a good reason...besides the fact that it can access any apps installed on your system: In a support document, Microsoft admits that features like Copilot Actions introduce "\novel security risks ." They warn about cross-prompt injection (XPIA), where malicious content in documents or UI elements can override the AI's instructions. The result? " Unintended actions like data exfiltration or malware installation ."

Yeah, you read that right. Microsoft is shipping a feature that could be tricked into installing malware on your system. Microsoft's own warning hits hard: "We recommend that you only enable this feature if you understand the security implications." When you try to enable these experimental features, Windows shows you a warning dialog that you have to acknowledge. ["This feature is still being tested and may impact the performance or security of your device."]

Even with these warnings, the level of access Copilot Actions demands is concerning. When you enable the feature, it gets read and write access to your Documents, Downloads, Desktop, Pictures, Videos, and Music folders... Microsoft says they are implementing safeguards. All actions are logged, users must approve data access requests, the feature operates in isolated workspaces, and the system uses audit logs to track activity.

But you are still giving an AI system that can "hallucinate and produce unexpected outputs" (Microsoft's words, not mine) full access to your personal files.
To address this, Ars Technica notes, Microsoft added this helpful warning to its support document this week. "As these capabilities are introduced, AI models still face functional limitations in terms of how they behave and occasionally may hallucinate and produce unexpected outputs."

But Microsoft didn't describe "what actions they should take to prevent their devices from being compromised. I asked Microsoft to provide these details, and the company declined..."

Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from 404 Media: The Ukrainian Army is knocking a once-hyped Russian superweapon out of the sky by jamming it with a song and tricking it into thinking it's in Lima, Peru. The Kremlin once called its Kh-47M2 Kinzhal ballistic missiles "invincible." Joe Biden said the missile was "almost impossible to stop." Now Ukrainian electronic warfare experts say they can counter the Kinzhal with some music and a re-direction order. [...] Kinzhals and other guided munitions navigate by communicating with Russian satellites that are part of the GLONASS system, a GPS-style navigation network. Night Watch uses a jamming system called Lima EW to generate a disruption field that prevents anything in the area from communicating with a satellite. Many traditional jamming systems work by blasting receivers on munitions and aircraft with radio noise. Lima does that, but also sends along a digital signal and spoofs navigation signals. It "hacks" the receiver it's communicating with to throw it off course.

Night Watch shared pictures of the downed Kinzhals with 404 Media that showed a missile with a controlled reception pattern antenna (CRPA), an active antenna that's meant to resist jamming and spoofing. "We discovered that this missile had pretty old type of technology," Night Watch said. "They had the same type of receivers as old Soviet missiles used to have. So there is nothing special, there is nothing new in those types of missiles." Night Watch told 404 Media that it used this Lima to take down 19 Kinzhals in the past two weeks. First, it replaces the missile's satellite navigation signals with the Ukrainian song "Our Father Is Bandera."

Any digital noise or random signal would work to jam the navigation system, but Night Watch wanted to use the song because they think it's funny. "We just send a song... we just make it into binary code, you know, like 010101, and just send it to the Russian navigation system," Night Watch said. "It's just kind of a joke. [Bandera] is a Ukrainian nationalist and Russia tries to use this person in their propaganda to say all Ukrainians are Nazis. They always try to scare the Russian people that Ukrainians are, culturally, all the same as Bandera." Once the song hits, Night Watch uses Lima to spoof a navigation signal to the missiles and make them think they're in Lima, Peru. Once the missile's confused about its location, it attempts to change direction. These missiles are fast -- launched from a MiG-31 they can hit speeds of up to Mach 5.7 or more than 4,000 miles per hour -- and an object moving that fast doesn't fare well with sudden changes of direction.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The world's largest music companies have licensed their works to a music startup called Klay, which is building a streaming service that will allow users to remake songs using artificial intelligence tools. Klay is the first music AI service to reach a deal with all three major record labels, Universal Music Group NV, Sony Music and Warner Music Group Corp., according to people familiar with the deals. Klay plans to announce its agreements in the coming days, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential plans.

Klay is building a product that will offer the features of a streaming service like Spotify, amplified by AI technology that will let users remake songs in different styles. Klay has licensed the rights to thousands of hit songs so that it can train its large language model. The company has positioned itself as a friend of the industry, offering assurances that the artists and labels will have some control over how their work is used. Klay is led by music producer Ary Attie and also employs former executives from Sony Music and Google's DeepMind, an AI laboratory.

Britain said on Wednesday it would ban the resale of tickets to concerts, sport and other live events for profit, disrupting ticket touts and the platforms that benefit from their activities. From a report: Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said touts were ripping off fans by using bots to snap up batches of tickets for coveted shows and reselling them at sky-high prices. "Our new proposals will shut down the touts' racket and make world-class music, comedy, theatre and sport affordable for everyone," she said, after the government had promised action.

CNN profiled the non-profit Internet Archive today — and included this tidbit about how they archive parts of the internet that are now "tucked in conversations with AI chatbots." The rise of artificial intelligence and AI chatbots means the Internet Archive is changing how it records the history of the internet. In addition to web pages, the Internet Archive now captures AI-generated content, like ChatGPT answers and those summaries that appear at the top of Google search results. The Internet Archive team, which is made up of librarians and software engineers, are experimenting with ways to preserve how people get their news from chatbots by coming up with hundreds of questions and prompts each day based on the news, and recording both the queries and outputs, [says Wayback Machine Director Mark Graham].
It sounds like a fun place to work... Archivists use bespoke machines to digitize books page by page, livestreaming their work on YouTube for all to see (alongside some lo-fi music). Record players churn out vintage tunes from 1920s and 1940s, and the building houses every type of media console for any type of content imaginable, from microfilm, to CDs and satellite television. (The Internet Archive preserves music, television, books and video games, too)... "There are a lot of people that are just passionate about the cause. There's a cyberpunk atmosphere," Annie Rauwerda, a Wikipedia editor and social media influencer, said at a party thrown at the Internet Archive's headquarters to celebrate reaching a trillion pages "The internet (feels) quite corporate when I use it a lot these days, but you wouldn't know from the people here."

An anonymous reader shared this report from PC World: It won't whip the llama's ass, but Opera has added a Spotify visualizer to its latest iteration of its free Opera One browser. Known as Sonic, the visualizer will be part of Opera's Dynamic Themes, which use the WebGPU standard to employ a dynamic theme that runs in the background of the browser. It's essentially a shader, which uses your PC's graphics engine to generate the moving background.

The browser also comes with a music player, which is set to Spotify by default. Users will have an opportunity to upgrade to Spotify Premium as part of the browser upgrade, Opera said. Opera's Sonic theme... takes the Spotify input and transforms it into a dynamic background.
"As any old tech head knows, the original visualizer was found in Winamp, which would sync visualizations to the beat and flow of music being played," the article points out.

And 27 years later, WinAmp arrived as an app in Apple's App Store and Google Play and in April of 2024. (The latest version was apparently released this May — and you can also download it to your desktop...)

Somewhere along the way, Winamp also announced "Winamp for Creators," which they're describing as a dedicated platform for music artists with monetization and promotion tools, music management services, and other essential resources "to help creators take control of their careers" (including "a powerful social media publishing tool that lets users write a single post and push it to all their social media channels simultaneously.")

Slashdot readers Tablizer and fjo3 share news that an AI-generated country song has topped the U.S. sales chart for the first time this week. ABC News reports: The new country tune, "Walk my Walk" by Breaking Rust, recently hit No. 1 on Billboard's Country Digital Song Sales chart, reaching over 3 million streams on Spotify in less than a month. That success has garnered mixed reactions from music fans and artists alike, particularly on TikTok, where hundreds of users have posted videos addressing the tune and others discussing the music in the comments.

Billboard has acknowledged Breaking Rust is an AI act and said it is one of at least six to chart in the past few months alone. "Ultimately, this feels like an experiment to see just how far something like this can go and what happens in the future and in other disciplines of art as well," senior entertainment reporter Kelley L. Carter told ABC News. "AI artists won't require things that a real human artist will require, and once companies start considering it and looking at bottom lines, I think that's when artists should rightly be concerned about it," she added.

A Munich court ruled that OpenAI violated German copyright law by training its models on lyrics from nine songs and allowing ChatGPT to reproduce them. OpenAI now faces damages as it considers an appeal. Reuters reports: The regional court in Munich found that the company trained its AI on protected content from nine German songs, including Groenemeyer's hits "Maenner" and "Bochum." The case was brought by German music rights society GEMA, whose members include composers, lyricists and publishers, in another sign of artists around the world fighting back against data scraping by AI.

Presiding judge Elke Schwager ordered OpenAI to pay damages for the use of copyrighted material, without disclosing a figure. GEMA legal advisor Kai Welp said GEMA hoped discussions could now take place with OpenAI on how copyright holders can be remunerated. OpenAI had argued that its language models did not store or copy specific training data but, rather, reflected what they had learned based on the entire training data set.

Since the output would only be generated as a result of user inputs known as prompts, it was not the defendants, but the respective user who would be liable for it, OpenAI had argued. However, the court found that both the memorization in the language models and the reproduction of the song lyrics in the chatbot's outputs constitute infringements of copyright exploitation rights, according to a statement on the ruling.