Report from MediaPost
In Brief – Another coalition of major publishers and authors has filed a class-action lawsuit against Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, alleging the company illegally downloaded millions of copyrighted books and journal articles from pirate websites to train its AI model, Llama. The complaint, filed in federal court in New York, claims Meta copied 267 terabytes of material off the internet, including vast amounts of pirated content, in what the plaintiffs describe as one of the largest copyright infringements ever. Meta denied wrongdoing and said it would defend itself aggressively, arguing that AI training on copyrighted material qualifies as fair use because it is transformative.
Context – The application of copyright law to AI training is a foundational legal and regulatory issue facing the industry. While the issue is being debated globally, a host of copyright lawsuits in US courts will be the most impactful. The key question is the application of the “fair use” doctrine to training under US copyright law. The Trump Administration’s AI legislative framework says that it believes that model training is fair use and that Congress should allow the judicial branch to resolve the issue. Two conflicting court opinions released last summer illustrate the complexities. Judge William Alsup issued a vigorous defense of generative AI training as “fair use” but harshly criticized Anthropic’s use of online databases notorious for piracy, leading to a $1.5 billion settlement. Judge Vincent Chhabria dismissed a copyright lawsuit targeting Meta’s AI training, but in doing so argued that AI training was not fair use, creating the novel concept of “indirect substitution” through which AI systems nullify the fair use defense by creating massive volumes of cheap content that, while not copies of the originals, are “similar enough to compete with the originals and thereby indirectly substitute for them,” harming copyright holders. These latest plaintiffs are hoping for a Chhabria-style fair use analysis, but if not that, a repeat of Alsup’s rejection of downloads from pirate sites will work. And also that Meta’s CEO remains personally involved in the lawsuit.