A new article by Professor Dornis, co-authored with Jane C. Ginsburg (Columbia University) and Nicola Lucchi (UPF Barcelona), takes the judgment of the Munich I Regional Court of 11 November 2025 as its point of departure for a doctrinal, comparative, and international copyright analysis, published in the JuristenZeitung.
The judgment marks a turning point in the European debate on AI training and copyright. For the first time, a German court has held that the embedding of protected song lyrics in model weights, as well as their prompt-driven reproduction, constitutes independent acts of exploitation and that the TDM exception under Art. 4 of the DSM Directive does not apply. On the doctrinal level, the authors examine the relationship between the copyright concept of reproduction, the technical functionality of AI models, and the phenomenon of “memorization” under European law. From a comparative perspective, they draw lines to US law, in particular the fair use decisions in Kadrey v. Meta and Bartz v. Anthropic. And in the field of international copyright, they highlight the as yet under-explored issue of the role of the three-step test. The authors conclude that the judgment is correct in principle, while leaving open questions that call for further analysis on multiple fronts. The appeal proceedings before the Munich Court of Appeal are pending.
The article has been published in issue 6/2026 of the JuristenZeitung.
A open-access version is available via Mohr Siebeck:
