US Publishers Sue Meta for Copyright Infringement

Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan, and McGraw Hill, along with author Scott Turow, have filed a lawsuit against Meta in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs allege that Meta used their copyrighted works without permission to train its artificial intelligence language model, Llama. The complaint claims that Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg adopted a 'move fast and break things' approach to 'win the AI arms race.' According to the filing, the company illegally downloaded millions of copyrighted books and journal articles from pirate sites to train the Llama model. The plaintiffs argue that Meta's actions constitute 'one of the largest copyright infringements in history' and are seeking monetary damages. The allegations also include the removal of copyright management information and unauthorized reproduction and distribution of the works. Meta stated in a response that it will aggressively defend against the lawsuit. The company noted that training AI on copyrighted materials may fall under fair use, citing court decisions supporting this view. This is not investment advice.