Reflections on the Hamburg Court’s Ruling on LAION

Spawning argues that the Hamburg Regional Court's LAION ruling shows copyright compliance for AI should be checked at the time of model training, not only at crawling, and that robots.txt is inadequate for this purpose. The court dismissed photographer Robert Kneschke's infringement claims against LAION, a non-profit that created and published a dataset of image links for AI training, citing Section 60d of German Copyright Law, which permits text and data mining for scientific research. The article notes that the court distinguished dataset creation from later model training and AI use. It also cites the Data Provenance Initiative's finding that about 25+ percent of tokens from the most critical domains had become restricted by robots.txt in 2023–2024.