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Academic and entertainment publishers say Meta “engaged in one of the largest massive infringements of copyrighted material in history” in new lawsuit foot Tuesday in U.S. District Court in New York.
The allegations are familiar: Publishers, including McGraw-Hill, Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, and Macmillan, allege that Meta illegally obtained or pirated copies of their copyrighted materials — scientific journal articles, textbooks, and other books — to train its Llama AI models. Author, lawyer, and former Authors Guild president Scott Turow also joins the publishers in the lawsuit.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is specifically named as a defendant, with the complaint saying the CEO “personally authorized and actively encouraged” the alleged illegal conduct. As a result, Meta’s AI “easily, quickly and at scale generates alternatives to the works (of authors) on which it has been trained.”
“Meta has chosen to live up to its motto of moving fast and breaking things, and must now be held accountable for what it broke, including copyright laws,” the Association of American Publishers said in a statement. The plaintiffs’ attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A Meta spokesperson told CNET: “Courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can be considered fair use. We will fight this lawsuit vigorously.”
New lawsuit, same questions
Copyright is one of the most controversial legal issues surrounding artificial intelligence. Technology companies like Meta need high-quality human-made data to build and improve their AI models. Almost all of this material is protected by copyright. This means that technology companies must enter into licensing agreements or defend their use of content as fair use under a provision of copyright law.
Meta and Anthropic have both He won previous cases In lawsuits brought by the authors, they successfully defended their fair use. Anthropy agreed Settlement of some piracy lawsuits With authors for $1.5 billion, or about $3,000 per pirated work. The two judges warned in their decisions that this would not be the outcome in every lawsuit.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria wrote His rule is 2025 for Mita“The market for typical human-created romance or spy novels could be significantly diminished by the proliferation of similar works created by artificial intelligence.”
One of the biggest considerations in these cases is whether technology companies’ use of copyrighted books will make it more difficult for human authors to sell their works or otherwise influence the market. The plaintiffs argue that Meta’s AI models can produce scientific articles and novels generated entirely by AI, pointing to a number of authors selling AI-written works on Amazon. This is especially troubling for authors who say people are using AI to create content in their own style.
“I find it sad and infuriating that one of the ten richest companies in the world has used pirated copies of my books, and thousands of other authors, to train llamas, which can produce competing material, including works purportedly in my style.” He told the New York Times.
Precedent—the history of prior court rulings—always plays a role in how current lawsuits develop. But it is too early to know whether this case will differ from previous cases in which judges sided with technology companies.