Judge dismisses authors' copyright lawsuit against Meta over AI training
[June 26, 2025] By
MATT O'BRIEN and BARBARA ORTUTAY
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A federal judge sided with Facebook parent Meta
Platforms in dismissing a copyright infringement lawsuit from a group of
authors who accused the company of stealing their works to train its
artificial intelligence technology.
The Wednesday ruling from U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria was the
second in a week from San Francisco's federal court to dismiss major
copyright claims from book authors against the rapidly developing AI
industry.
Chhabria found that 13 authors who sued Meta “made the wrong arguments”
and tossed the case. But the judge also said that the ruling is limited
to the authors in the case and does not mean that Meta’s use of
copyrighted materials is lawful.
“This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of
copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,” Chhabria
wrote. “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.”
Lawyers for the plaintiffs — a group of well-known writers that includes
comedian Sarah Silverman and authors Jacqueline Woodson and Ta-Nehisi
Coates — said in a statement that the "court ruled that AI companies
that ‘feed copyright-protected works into their models without getting
permission from the copyright holders or paying for them’ are generally
violating the law. Yet, despite the undisputed record of Meta’s
historically unprecedented pirating of copyrighted works, the court
ruled in Meta’s favor. We respectfully disagree with that conclusion.”
Meta said it appreciates the decision.
“Open-source AI models are powering transformative innovations,
productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and fair use
of copyright material is a vital legal framework for building this
transformative technology,” the Menlo Park, California-based company
said in a statement.
Although Meta prevailed in its request to dismiss the case, it could
turn out to be a pyrrhic victory. In his 40-page ruling, Chhabria
repeatedly indicated reasons to believe that Meta and other AI companies
have turned into serial copyright infringers as they train their
technology on books and other works created by humans, and seemed to be
inviting other authors to bring cases to his court presented in a manner
that would allow them to proceed to trial.
The judge scoffed at arguments that requiring AI companies to adhere to
decades-old copyright laws would slow down advances in a crucial
technology at a pivotal time. "These products are expected to generate
billions, even trillions of dollars for the companies that are
developing them. If using copyrighted works to train the models is as
necessary as the companies say, they will figure out a way to compensate
copyright holders for it.”
On Monday, from the same courthouse, U.S. District Judge William Alsup
ruled that AI company Anthropic didn’t break the law by training its
chatbot Claude on millions of copyrighted books, but the company must
still go to trial for illicitly acquiring those books from pirate
websites instead of buying them.
But the actual process of an AI system distilling from thousands of
written works to be able to produce its own passages of text qualified
as “fair use” under U.S. copyright law because it was “quintessentially
transformative,” Alsup wrote.
In the Meta case, the authors had argued in court filings that Meta is
“liable for massive copyright infringement” by taking their books from
online repositories of pirated works and feeding them into Meta's
flagship generative AI system Llama.
[to top of second column] |
Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox speaks at LlamaCon 2025, an AI
developer conference, in Menlo Park, Calif., April 29, 2025. (AP
Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
 Lengthy and distinctively written
passages of text — such as those found in books — are highly useful
for teaching generative AI chatbots the patterns of human language.
“Meta could and should have paid” to buy and license those literary
works, the authors' attorneys argued.
Meta countered in court filings that U.S. copyright law “allows the
unauthorized copying of a work to transform it into something new”
and that the new, AI-generated expression that comes out of its
chatbots is fundamentally different from the books it was trained
on.
"After nearly two years of litigation, there still is no evidence
that anyone has ever used Llama as a substitute for reading
Plaintiffs’ books, or that they even could,” Meta's attorneys
argued.
Meta says Llama won’t output the actual works it has copied, even
when asked to do so.
“No one can use Llama to read Sarah Silverman’s description of her
childhood, or Junot Diaz’s story of a Dominican boy growing up in
New Jersey,” its attorneys wrote.
Accused of pulling those books from online “shadow libraries," Meta
has also argued that the methods it used have “no bearing on the
nature and purpose of its use” and it would have been the same
result if the company instead struck a deal with real libraries.
Such deals are how Google built its online Google Books repository
of more than 20 million books, though it also fought a decade of
legal challenges before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 let stand
lower court rulings that rejected copyright infringement claims.
The authors' case against Meta forced CEO Mark Zuckerberg to be
deposed, and has disclosed internal conversations at the company
over the ethics of tapping into pirated databases that have long
attracted scrutiny.
“Authorities regularly shut down their domains and even prosecute
the perpetrators,” the authors' attorneys argued in a court filing.
"That Meta knew taking copyrighted works from pirated databases
could expose the company to enormous risk is beyond dispute: it
triggered an escalation to Mark Zuckerberg and other Meta executives
for approval. Their gamble should not pay off.”
The named plaintiffs are Jacqueline Woodson, Richard Kadrey, Andrew
Sean Greer, Rachel Louise Snyder, David Henry Hwang, Ta-Nehisi
Coates, Laura Lippman, Matthew Klam, Junot Diaz, Sarah Silverman,
Lysa TerKeurst, Christopher Golden and Christopher Farnsworth.
Chhabria said in the ruling that while he had “no choice” but to
grant Meta’s summary judgment tossing the case, “in the grand scheme
of things, the consequences of this ruling are limited. This is not
a class action, so the ruling only affects the rights of these 13
authors -- not the countless others whose works Meta used to train
its models.”
—
AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke contributed to this story.
All contents © copyright 2025 Associated Press. All rights reserved |
