Munich Regional Court I largely upheld GEMA's claims against two OpenAI companies over lyrics from nine songs. Its release says comparison with chatbot responses persuaded the chamber that the lyrics were reproducibly contained through memorization in GPT-4 and GPT-4o. It treated that fixation as a copyright reproduction and separately found infringement when outputs reproduced recognizable protected elements. The court rejected OpenAI's argument that users bore responsibility because prompts produced the responses and the companies operated the models. It awarded undisclosed damages. The ruling was not final. The chamber dismissed a separate personality-right claim concerning altered lyrics falsely attributed to authors.

The case gave judges lyrics and outputs that could be aligned line by line with the prompts that elicited them. From that evidence, the chamber reached a legal finding about reproducible inclusion in these models. The finding does not establish that every training work is stored or that every generated resemblance proves copying. It concerns nine lyrics whose length and complexity led the court to exclude chance as the explanation for their reproduction. OpenAI disagreed and was considering its next steps. If the judgment survives appeal, operators serving protected passages may face licenses and damages even when a user initiated the request. For a songwriter, decisive evidence can include the recognizable lines delivered in a chatbot response and the operator that serves the response.