Munich court rises to prominence in AI copyright litigation

In both cases, the judges considered claims brought by the German collective rights society GEMA, which mainly focuses on administering and licensing music copyrights on behalf of composers, lyricists, and music publishers. GEMA successfully sued OpenAI for copyright infringement in a judgment handed down in November 2025; its latest success came against the US-based operator of an AI-based music generator, Suno.

Suno’s AI-based music generator was trained in the US with data derived from YouTube, among other sources. The court determined that the training data was obtained by illegal means, such as stream-ripping, which involves circumventing security measures applied by online streaming service providers in order to download the content – in this case for third-party AI training purposes.

The judges in Munich assumed jurisdiction over not only the provision and use of the Suno music generator in Germany but also in respect to the training of the underlying AI model that took place on US soil. Accordingly, they applied German copyright law to the operation of the AI-based application and US copyright to the training phase.

The Munich court upheld the asserted claims, assessing that Suno required a licence from GEMA to use the works in question to train its AI model, and to offer the creation of music pieces by means of Suno’s music generator. As regards the latter, the judges took the view – as they had done in the OpenAI case too – that copyright-protected works which had been used in the course of the training phase would continue to exist within the AI model by means of systematic memorisation. Suno, rather than the prompting user, was seen by the judges as the main creator of the infringing output given that fairly simple prompts repeatedly led to output being generated that was either identical or at least very similar to the protected lyrics and melodies.

In reaching its verdict, the court built on the same line of argument as they did their judgment in the GEMA v OpenAI case. They rejected Suno’s arguments that its system had neither stored nor reproduced the copyright works at issue, pointing to the phenomenon of “memorisation”.

This concept of memorisation is heavily debated amongst copyright experts. Some dispute the fact that AI systems memorise the content they are trained on. Their view is that there is no sufficient materialisation of works within AI models as any information is stored in an atomised manner and put together only ad hoc in response to a specific prompt input to the system. They consider that the compilation of output is based on contextualised probability instead. The Regional Court of Munich took a different perspective and ruled in favour of GEMA.

In respect of the training phase, the judges took a deep dive into the requirements of the ‘fair use’ principle – a carve out from copyright protections provided for under US copyright law. Ultimately, they reached the conclusion that Suno’s use of the respective works went beyond what may be justified under the doctrine of fair use.

The court further considered that the reproduction of the copyright protected music by Suno did not fall within the text and data mining exception contained in German, and EU, copyright law either.

GEMA has raised separate litigation against Suno in respect of its AI training before the US courts. Earlier this year, the US government said it is its view that AI developers can use others’ copyrighted content to train their models without infringing US copyright laws.