A German higher regional court has thrown out a photographer's copyright claim over an AI-generated cartoon made from one of her pictures. It ruled that transforming a photo with AI isn't automatically infringement.
The photographer sells underwater shots of dogs. A former business partner fed one of them, a dog diving for a red toy, into AI software, got a comic-style version and put it on their own website. The new image kept the scene but showed the whole dog with exaggerated paws in a flat, cartoon style.
The court, whose April decision was summarised by law firm Bird & Bird, separated what the photographer created from what she captured. Framing, perspective, lighting and depth of field count as her protected choices. A dog reaching for a toy underwater is only an idea. Because the AI version kept the subject but changed all of the protected elements, the court found no infringement.
PetaPixel links the ruling to an earlier German case in which stock photographer Robert Kneschke lost to the LAION dataset. That court treated LAION's free distribution of his images, which were used to train image generators, as non-commercial research.
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