Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg are facing a lawsuit from five major publishers and author Scott Turow alleging the company illegally copied millions of copyrighted works to train its AI systems. According to the lawsuit Zuckerberg personally authorized the process.
Variety reports that the lawsuit filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York accuses Meta of engaging in what plaintiffs describe as “one of the most massive infringements of copyrighted materials in history.” The publishers bringing the suit include Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage, along with author Scott Turow. The proposed class-action lawsuit seeks unspecified monetary damages.
According to the complaint, Meta allegedly obtained copyrighted materials through illegal torrenting from pirate sites and unauthorized web scraping to train Llama, the company’s multibillion-dollar generative AI system. The plaintiffs claim that Zuckerberg personally authorized and actively encouraged this alleged infringement.
The suit specifically claims that Meta stripped copyright management information from the stolen works to conceal training sources and facilitate unauthorized use. According to the plaintiffs, Meta was well aware of the market for licensing AI training materials but chose a different path.
The complaint reveals that after releasing Llama 1, Meta briefly considered entering licensing deals with major publishers. Between January and April 2023, the company discussed increasing its dataset licensing budget to as much as $200 million dollars. However, in early April 2023, Meta abruptly stopped its licensing strategy.
According to the lawsuit, the decision to halt licensing efforts was escalated to Zuckerberg himself. After this escalation, Meta’s business development team received verbal instructions to stop licensing efforts. One Meta employee described the rationale in terms quoted in the suit, stating that if the company licensed a single book, it would not be able to lean into the fair use strategy.
According to the complaint, Zuckerberg and other Meta executives authorized and directed the torrenting of over 267 terabytes of pirated material, equivalent to hundreds of millions of publications and many times the size of the entire print collection of the Library of Congress.
The plaintiffs allege that as a result of this infringement, Meta’s AI system readily generates substitutes for their copyrighted works at speed and scale. These substitutes allegedly take multiple forms, including verbatim and near-verbatim copies, replacement chapters of academic textbooks, summaries and alternative versions of famous novels and journal articles, inferior knockoffs that copy creative elements of original works, and derivative works exclusively reserved to rights holders. The lawsuit claims Llama even tailors outputs to mimic the expressive elements and creative choices of specific authors.
In a statement to Breitbart News, a Meta spokesperson wrote, “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.”
Silicon Valley’s relentless quest to win the AI war is impacting every aspect of the American economy as well as traditional legal concepts like copyright. The spread of AI to companies of all industries and its impact on American workers is one of the primary themes of the instant bestseller by Breitbart News Social Media Director Wynton Hall, Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI.
Read more at Variety here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.