Major Publishers and Author Sue Meta Over Alleged Use of Copyrighted Works in Llama AI Training

Five major publishing houses—Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan, and McGraw Hill—along with author Scott Turow filed a lawsuit against Meta on Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan. The proposed class-action complaint alleges that Meta pirated millions of copyrighted works, ranging from textbooks to scientific articles to novels, to train its large language model Llama.

Plaintiffs claim Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally authorized and actively encouraged the copyright infringement.

The lawsuit accuses Meta of ripping copyrighted material from pirate sites including LibGen, Anna’s Archive, Sci-Hub, and Sci-Mag. It further alleges that Meta trained Llama using information from the Common Crawl dataset, which contains unauthorized copies of copyrighted works. As a result, Llama outputs verbatim and near-verbatim substitutes of copyrighted material, according to the complaint.

For instance, when prompted with two brief sentences from Cengage’s textbook Calculus: Early Transcendentals, 9th edition by James Stewart, Llama reproduced word-for-word the continuation of the section. K. Jemisin and The Wild Robot by Peter Brown.

Authors published by the five suing companies include Scott Turow, James Patterson, Donna Tartt, former President Joe Biden, Yiyun Li, and Amanda Vaill. Yiyun Li and Amanda Vaill are two of the Pulitzer Prize winners announced on Monday. The plaintiffs asked the court for permission to represent a larger class of copyright owners.

They seek an unspecified amount of monetary damages and ask the court to order Meta to block its allegedly unlawful activities. The plaintiffs also ask the court to require Meta to provide a list of books, journal articles, and other copyrighted works used to train Llama AI models. ” Meta stated it will fight the lawsuit aggressively.

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

All pending cases 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 AI fair use of copyrighted material issued diverging rulings last year. Last year, a federal judge ruled in favor of Meta in one lawsuit over AI training on copyrighted materials. 5 billion to resolve a class-action lawsuit that could have cost the company billions more in damages for alleged piracy.

5 billion to settle a class action suit initiated by Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson. A final approval hearing for the Anthropic settlement is scheduled for next week. The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.

Mark Zuckerberg testified during a Senate judiciary committee hearing in Washington DC on 31 January 2024. The plaintiffs allege that Meta reproduced and distributed millions of copyrighted works without permission, without providing any compensation to authors or publishers, and with full knowledge that their conduct violated copyright law.