Five major publishers have filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms in Manhattan federal court, accusing the tech giant of using their copyrighted books and journal articles without permission to train its artificial intelligence models. The proposed class-action complaint, filed on Tuesday, includes publishers Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan, and McGraw Hill, along with author Scott Turow.
Allegations of Piracy
The publishers claim that Meta pirated millions of their works to train its Llama large language models, which are designed to respond to human prompts. Maria Pallante, president of the Association of American Publishers, stated, “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.”
Meta has denied any wrongdoing. A spokesperson for the company responded, “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.”
Works Involved
The lawsuit alleges that Meta used a wide range of copyrighted materials, including textbooks, scientific articles, and novels such as The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin and The Wild Robot by Peter Brown. The publishers are seeking permission to represent a larger class of copyright owners and are demanding an unspecified amount of monetary damages.
Broader Copyright Battle
This case represents a new front in the ongoing legal struggle between creators and tech companies over the use of copyrighted material for AI training. Dozens of authors, news outlets, and visual artists have sued companies like Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic for infringement. The central issue in these cases is whether AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by creating new, transformative content. Two judges who have considered the matter issued conflicting rulings last year.
Anthropic, backed by Amazon and Google, became the first major AI company to settle one of these cases, agreeing last year to pay $1.5 billion to a group of authors to resolve a class-action lawsuit. The New York Times has also sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.
