Major publishers sue Meta for copyright infringement over AI training

Summary

• Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill sue Meta
• Lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court
• Allegations of unauthorized use for AI training of Llama
• Anthropic settled a similar case for $1.5 billion

Publishers Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan and McGraw Hill sued Meta Platforms in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, alleging that the tech giant misused their books and journal articles to train its artificial intelligence model Llama.

The publishers, as well as author Scott Turow, alleged in the proposed class action complaint that Meta pirated millions of their works and used them without permission to train its large language models to respond to human prompts.

“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,” a Meta spokesperson responded in a statement on Tuesday.

“We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”

The publishers allege that Meta pirated works ranging from textbooks to scientific articles to novels including “The Fifth Season” by N.K. Jemisin and “The Wild Robot” by Peter Brown for its AI training. They asked the court for permission to represent a larger class of copyright owners and an unspecified amount of monetary damages.

“Meta’s mass-scale infringement isn’t public progress, and AI will never be properly realized if tech companies prioritize pirate sites over scholarship and imagination,” Maria Pallante, president of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement.

The lawsuit opens a new front in the ongoing copyright battle between creators and tech companies over AI training, in which dozens of authors, news outlets, visual artists and other plaintiffs have sued companies including Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic for infringement.

All of the pending cases will likely revolve around whether AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by using it to create new, transformative content. The first two judges to consider the matter issued diverging rulings last year.

Amazon- and Google-backed Anthropic was the first major AI company to settle one ​of the cases, agreeing last year to pay a group of authors $1.5 billion to resolve a class-action lawsuit that could have cost the company billions more in damages for alleged piracy.