Federal judge rules in Meta's favor in lawsuit over using copyrighted books to train AI models

A judge supports Meta, calling AI model training fair use.

: Vince Chhabria, a federal judge, ruled in favor of Meta in a lawsuit involving 13 authors, including Sarah Silverman, regarding the unauthorized use of their books to train AI models. The judge deemed Meta's actions as fair use under copyright law, emphasizing that the AI models' use was transformative and did not harm the market for authors' works. This decision follows a similar ruling involving Anthropic, marking a positive trend for tech companies but noting that these decisions are limited in scope. Chhabria highlighted the importance of strong arguments and evidence in such cases, stating the plaintiffs failed to show market harm effectively.

A U.S. federal judge has ruled in favor of Meta Platforms in a high-profile lawsuit brought by a group of authors who alleged the company used their copyrighted books without permission to train its LLaMA AI models. The case, led by comedian and author Sarah Silverman and others, claimed Meta violated copyright law by incorporating their texts into datasets used to build generative AI. However, Judge Vince Chhabria dismissed the lawsuit, stating the authors failed to show how Meta’s use of their works caused economic harm or replaced the market for the original books.

The ruling emphasized that while the use of copyrighted material in AI training is controversial, the plaintiffs needed to demonstrate concrete market damage to pursue a successful claim. The court noted that generative AI systems like LLaMA do not replicate or distribute the original texts but instead use them to identify patterns and generate new, unrelated content. Without showing a substantial effect on sales or licensing opportunities, the claims lacked the necessary legal grounding.

Judge Chhabria also commented that simply alleging that books were part of a training dataset is insufficient to establish copyright infringement. He pointed out that the plaintiffs provided no specific examples of their works being copied or outputted by the model. Moreover, there was no evidence that Meta stored or redistributed the copyrighted books in a manner that competes with the original works.

While this decision is a win for Meta, it doesn’t give AI companies carte blanche to use copyrighted materials freely. The judge underscored that different facts in future cases—such as clearer outputs replicating protected texts or stronger proof of market harm—could lead to different legal outcomes. The case may influence ongoing debates around AI and copyright, but its narrow basis means broader questions remain unresolved.

The lawsuit's dismissal aligns with a similar legal outcome involving Anthropic, another AI firm, suggesting a trend toward judicial recognition of certain AI training uses as potentially fair. Still, courts continue to explore the limits of this interpretation, and future lawsuits could shift the landscape depending on how copyright, market impact, and AI transparency are addressed.

Sources: Reuters, AP News, Wired, Financial Times, The Verge

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