In a widely followed copyright claims, Meta won the case as a US federal judge on Wednesday decided in favor of tech firm Meta, concluding that the company’s use of copyrighted books to train its AI model qualified as “fair use” under US law.
A group of authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman and novelist Junot Díaz, claimed that Meta had illegally used pirated versions of their works to train its open-source LLaMA generative AI system.
The decision, which was delivered by District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco, rejected their claims.
Although the writers expressed significant worries about possible harm to the market, Judge Chhabria pointed out that their legal defenses fell short of proving that Meta’s actions infringed against copyright hence Meta won copyright claims.
The judge said in his ruling:
“No matter how transformative [generative AI] training may be, it’s hard to imagine that it can be fair use to use copyrighted books to develop a tool to make billions or trillions of dollars while enabling the creation of a potentially endless stream of competing works.”
He did, however, come to the conclusion that the plaintiffs had not put up the proper legal strategy to prevail in this case.
Following an additional verdict by US District Judge William Alsup, who also sided with AI business Anthropic in a similar complaint filed by authors over the use of copyrighted literature to train the Claude chatbot, the ruling is the second significant legal victory for AI corporations this week.
The authors of the books claimed that Meta downloaded illegal versions of their works without their consent or payment. Silverman’s memoir, The Bedwetter, and Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, were among the titles mentioned in the case.
Meta welcomed the ruling, and stated:
“Open-source AI models are powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and fair use of copyright material is a vital legal framework for building this transformative technology.”
The judge explained that although the decision gives Meta a legal respite, it does not imply that the company’s actions are acceptable in general.
He wrote:
“This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful. It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.”
In the era of generative AI, where enormous amounts of online content—including books, music, art, and journalism—are being fed into sophisticated language models without the artists’ express consent, the court’s ruling underscores a developing discussion about the limits of fair use.
Numerous musicians, artists, and media organizations have brought similar claims in the US and other countries, claiming that AI corporations are making money off of creative work while eschewing conventional licensing systems.
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