Meta has been sued by major book publishers for copyright infringement

Meta is facing a class-action lawsuit filed by five major book publishers and one author over allegations that the company “engaged in one of the largest infringements of copyrighted material in history” when training its Llama AI models, as I mentioned it earlier before New York Times. in I changed themMacmillan, McGraw-Hill, Elsevier, Hachette, Cengage, and author Scott Turow allege that Meta “repeatedly copied” their books and journal articles without permission.

The lawsuit accuses Meta of stealing copyrighted works from “notorious pirate sites,” such as LibGen, Anna’s Archive, Sci-Hub, Sci-Mag and others, and then feeding that material into its AI model. It also claims that Meta trained Llama with information within the Common Crawl dataset, which was allegedly “filled with unauthorized copies of copyrighted works.” As a result, Llamas “produces literal and near-literal alternatives” to copyrighted material:

For example, when asked for two brief sentences from Cengage’s best-selling book, Calculus: Ninth Edition by James Stewart, Llama begins to reproduce the continuity of the section word for word.

A group of authors also sued Anthropic for copyright infringement. While a federal judge ruled so Training AI models on legally purchased books Without permission being considered fair use, it allowed the authors to proceed with a class action lawsuit over the “millions” of humanitarian works that were allegedly pirated. Anthropic agreed to pay for the book $1.5 billion last year to settle the class action lawsuit.

Toro and the publisher group are suing Meta for damages, asking the court to order the company to ban its alleged illegal activities. They are also asking the court to require the company to provide a list of books, newspaper articles and other copyrighted works on which it trained Llama AI models.

“AI fosters transformative innovations, productivity, and creativity for individuals and businesses, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can be considered fair use,” Dave Arnold, a Meta spokesman, said in an email statement. Edge. “We will fight this lawsuit vigorously.”