Five Publishers and Scott Turow Sue Meta for Copyright Infringement

Five publishers (Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw-Hill, Elsevier, and Cengage) and the best-selling novelist Scott Turow are filing a class action lawsuit against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, the New York Times reports. In the claim filed on Tuesday morning in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, the publishers allege that Meta illegally used their work to train its artificial intelligence program, Llama. They also claim that the program removed copyright notices for the work it was training on. The publishers allege that Zuckerberg approved the use of copyright infringement. “A.I. is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training A.I. on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use,” Dave Arnold, Meta spokesperson, said in a statement to The Times. “We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.” The complaint also says that people are using the program to write books using the AI material from Llama.

Last July, a judge dismissed a similar lawsuit against Meta where writers like Sarah Silverman, Jacqueline Woodson, and Ta-Nehisi Coates sued the company for using their copyrighted work without consent or pay. “This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,” U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria wrote at the time. “It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.”