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Five major book publishers, Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan, and McGraw Hill, have filed a lawsuit against Meta in Manhattan federal court alleging that Meta used their books and journal articles without permission to train its Llama artificial intelligence (AI) model.
Author Scott Turow is also a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit representing other authors whose work was used without permission. Meta is accused of pirated millions of books such as The Fifth Season and The Wild Robot, which were then used as data to train its AI model.
The publisher is seeking court permission to represent larger copyright owners and is seeking undisclosed financial damages from Meta. The president of the Association of American Publishers said Meta’s actions are “a massive invasion” and will jeopardize the future of AI if tech companies prioritize pirated sites over scholarly works.
Meta said it was defending itself by arguing that training AI using copyrighted works could be considered fair use and vowed to fight the lawsuit. This is another major lawsuit facing Meta.
Last September, Anthropic settled a copyright infringement case by paying $1.5 billion to a group of authors to end a class-action lawsuit. The court rejected the settlement because the authors only received $3,000 in damages for each work that was infringed.
In a lawsuit filed by authors Richard Kadrey, Christopher Golden, and comedian Sarah Silverman against Meta last year, the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company was found to have downloaded at least 81.7 TB of pirated works via torrents. Even if it was found not guilty under fair use, Meta could face legal action because after downloading the torrents, they were seeding the pirated works. This is clearly a violation of US anti-piracy laws.
