Publishing Houses and Scott Turow Sue Meta for Copyright Infringement

Five publishing houses and bestselling author Scott Turow sued Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, accusing the company of illegally using millions of copyrighted works to train its AI language system Llama. The class action lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, alleges that Meta reproduced and distributed these materials without permission or compensation to authors and publishers, despite knowing the conduct violated copyright law.

In the suit. The plaintiffs claim Zuckerberg personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement, following Meta's motto of 'move fast and break things' by drawing upon books and journal articles for Llama. According to the complaint, Meta knowingly copied copyrighted materials from pirate websites such as LibGen and Anna's Archive to train various iterations of the model.

The suit argues Meta willfully bypassed legal licensing markets to gain an advantage in the AI arms race. Authors published by the suing companies include 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.

U.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, and Lemony Snicket's Who Could That Be at This Hour?. The class represented by Turow encompasses all legal or beneficial owners of registered copyrights for any book with an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) or journal article with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) or International Standard Serial Number (ISSN).

The plaintiffs seek statutory damages, a permanent injunction against Meta to stop further use of their works, and an order requiring the company to destroy all infringing copies of the materials. I. has been created with stolen words, and it is shameful that these violations were undertaken by one of the richest corporations in the world.