By Michaela Gordoni
Author Scott Turow and a group of publishers sued Meta on Tuesday because it downloaded millions of copyright books to train its AI model, Llama.
The plaintiffs say Meta approached publishers to get permission but “stole the works instead,” Deadline reported.
The company apparently did so under CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal instruction.
“That path was more expedient for Meta, but it deprived publishers and authors of fair compensation and spurned established licensing markets,” the lawsuit stated.
A Meta spokesperson said, “AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use. We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”
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The publishers say their work is threatened by Llama’s ability to produce copies of its books.
“In their effort to win the AI ‘arms race’ and build a functional generative AI model, Defendants Meta and Zuckerberg followed their well-known motto: ‘move fast and break things,’” the plaintiffs said in their lawsuit. “They first illegally torrented millions of copyrighted books and journal articles from notorious pirate sites and downloaded unauthorized web scrapes of virtually the entire internet.”
The continued, “They then copied those stolen fruits many times over to train Meta’s multibillion-dollar generative AI system called Llama. In doing so, Defendants engaged in one of the most massive infringements of copyrighted materials in history.”
Last year, a federal judge ruled that Anthropic’s use of copyrighted books for its training models was a fair use. The judge also ruled that the company still had to answer to downloading millions of pirated books in digital form off the internet. Anthropic later reached a $1.5 billion class action settlement.
Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger told NPR that Meta’s use of the copyrighted books is “the most flagrant copyright breach in history. And these voracious tech companies need to be held accountable.”
The class-action suit could include many authors and anyone who is a legal or beneficial owner “of registered copyrights, in whole or in part, for any book possessing an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) or journal article possessing a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) or International Standard Serial Number (ISSN).”
In June, a federal judge dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit from several authors who accused Meta of stealing their works to train its models.
“The Court has no choice but to grant summary judgment to Meta on the plaintiffs’ claim that the company violated copyright law by training its models with their books,” said US District Court Judge Vince Chhabria, who found that the plaintiffs did not present enough evidence to argue that Meta’s use of their copyrighted works was harmful.
As the case was just filed on Tuesday, no hearing date has been set yet.
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