“The collecting society GEMA, which manages the rights of composers, lyricists and music publishers and has approximately 100,000 members, filed the case against OpenAI in November 2024.”
“The collecting society GEMA, which manages the rights of composers, lyricists and music publishers and has approximately 100,000 members, filed the case against OpenAI in November 2024.”
According to Are Song Lyrics Copyrighted? How the Law Works, unless their use is ‘fair use’ or they have a license, then they are violating copyright, if I understand the article correctly. I believe that site explains laws in the United States. It probably varies somewhat by jurisdiction, so I expect it would depend on who owns the website and where they are based.
To tag along with this, I remember this becoming an issue 10 or 15 years ago and a lot of the big lyrics websites were forced to reach licensing agreements with the songwriting groups like ASCAP and BMI (they collect and distribute royalties on behalf of the writers). I think a couple sites tried going to court to claim fair use but lost pretty quickly. That’s pretty established law going back to the earliest days of music publishing. Just because they were publishing online instead of printing up songbooks doesn’t mean the laws change.
From the article, it doesn’t look like these websites should be legal. Musixmatch also doesn’t fall under fair use, I would think.