Judge dismisses authors’ copyright lawsuit against Meta over AI training; AP, June 25, 2025

MATT O’BRIEN AND BARBARA ORTUTAY, AP; Judge dismisses authors’ copyright lawsuit against Meta over AI training

"Although Meta prevailed in its request to dismiss the case, it could turn out to be a pyrrhic victory. In his 40-page ruling, Chhabria repeatedly indicated reasons to believe that Meta and other AI companies have turned into serial copyright infringers as they train their technology on books and other works created by humans, and seemed to be inviting other authors to bring cases to his court presented in a manner that would allow them to proceed to trial.

The judge scoffed at arguments that requiring AI companies to adhere to decades-old copyright laws would slow down advances in a crucial technology at a pivotal time. “These products are expected to generate billions, even trillions of dollars for the companies that are developing them. If using copyrighted works to train the models is as necessary as the companies say, they will figure out a way to compensate copyright holders for it.”

Study: Meta AI model can reproduce almost half of Harry Potter book; Ars Technica, June 20, 2025

 TIMOTHY B. LEE  , Ars Techcnica; Study: Meta AI model can reproduce almost half of Harry Potter book

"In recent years, numerous plaintiffs—including publishers of books, newspapers, computer code, and photographs—have sued AI companies for training models using copyrighted material. A key question in all of these lawsuits has been how easily AI models produce verbatim excerpts from the plaintiffs’ copyrighted content.

For example, in its December 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI, The New York Times Company produced dozens of examples where GPT-4 exactly reproduced significant passages from Times stories. In its response, OpenAI described this as a “fringe behavior” and a “problem that researchers at OpenAI and elsewhere work hard to address.”

But is it actually a fringe behavior? And have leading AI companies addressed it? New research—focusing on books rather than newspaper articles and on different companies—provides surprising insights into this question. Some of the findings should bolster plaintiffs’ arguments, while others may be more helpful to defendants.

The paper was published last month by a team of computer scientists and legal scholars from Stanford, Cornell, and West Virginia University. They studied whether five popular open-weight models—three from Meta and one each from Microsoft and EleutherAI—were able to reproduce text from Books3, a collection of books that is widely used to train LLMs. Many of the books are still under copyright."

Eminem Hits Meta With A Copyright Lawsuit After It Allegedly Misappropriated Hundreds Of His Songs; ABOVE THE LAW, June 4, 2025

  Chris Williams , ABOVE THE LAW; Eminem Hits Meta With A Copyright Lawsuit After It Allegedly Misappropriated Hundreds Of His Songs

"Don’t. Mess. With. Eminem. And if the events are as cut and dried as the complaint makes it seem, Meta is getting off easy with the $109M price tag. Meta of all companies should know that the only thing that can get away with brazenly stealing the work of wealthy hard-working artists without facing legal consequences is AI-scrapping software."

Judge Hints Anthropic’s AI Training on Books Is Fair Use; Bloomberg Law, May 22, 2025

 

Annelise Levy

, Bloomberg Law; Judge Hints Anthropic’s AI Training on Books Is Fair Use

"A California federal judge is leaning toward finding Anthropic PBC violated copyright law when it made initial copies of pirated books, but that its subsequent uses to train their generative AI models qualify as fair use.

“I’m inclined to say they did violate the Copyright Act but the subsequent uses were fair use,” Judge William Alsup said Thursday during a hearing in San Francisco. “That’s kind of the way I’m leaning right now,” he said, but concluded the 90-minute hearing by clarifying that his decision isn’t final. “Sometimes I say that and change my mind."...

The first judge to rule will provide a window into how federal courts interpret the fair use argument for training generative artificial intelligence models with copyrighted materials. A decision against Anthropic could disrupt the billion-dollar business model behind many AI companies, which rely on the belief that training with unlicensed copyrighted content doesn’t violate the law."

Meta lawsuit poses first big test of AI copyright battle; Financial Times, May 1, 2025

 Cristina Criddle and Hannah Murphy, Financial Times; Meta lawsuit poses first big test of AI copyright battle

 "The case, which has been brought by about a dozen authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Kadrey, is centred on the $1.4tn social media giant’s use of LibGen, a so-called shadow library of millions of books, academic articles and comics, to train its Llama AI models. The ruling will have wide-reaching implications in the fierce copyright battle between artists and AI groups and is one of several lawsuits around the world that allege technology groups are using content without permission."

Meta Faces Copyright Reckoning in Authors’ Generative AI Case; Bloomberg Law, April 30, 2025

Isaiah Poritz, Annelise Levy, Bloomberg Law; Meta Faces Copyright Reckoning in Authors’ Generative AI Case

"The way courts will view the fair use argument for training generative artificial intelligence models with copyrighted materials will be tested Thursday in a San Francisco courtroom, when the first of dozens of such lawsuits reaches summary judgment.

Meta Platforms Inc. and a group of authors including comedian Sarah Silverman will square off before Judge Vince Chhabria, who will decide whether Meta’s use of pirated books to train its AI model Llama qualifies as fair use, or if the issue should be left to a jury."

I didn’t eat or sleep’: a Meta moderator on his breakdown after seeing beheadings and child abuse; The Guardian, April 27, 2025

 Rachel Hall and Claire Wilmot, The Guardian; I didn’t eat or sleep’: a Meta moderator on his breakdown after seeing beheadings and child abuse

"When Solomon* strode into the gleaming Octagon tower in Accra, Ghana, for his first day as a Meta content moderator, he was bracing himself for difficult but fulfilling work, purging social media of harmful content.

But after just two weeks of training, the scale and depravity of what he was exposed to was far darker than he ever imagined."

Meta faces Ghana lawsuits over impact of extreme content on moderators; The Guardian, April 27, 2025

Rachel Hall and Claire Wilmot, The Guardian; Meta faces Ghana lawsuits over impact of extreme content on moderators

"Meta is facing a second set of lawsuits in Africa over the psychological distress experienced by content moderators employed to take down disturbing social media content including depictions of murders, extreme violence and child sexual abuse.

Lawyers are gearing up for court action against a company contracted by Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, after meeting moderators at a facility in Ghana that is understood to employ about 150 people.

Moderators working for Majorel in Accra claim they have suffered from depression, anxiety, insomnia and substance abuse as a direct consequence of the work they do checking extreme content.

The allegedly gruelling conditions endured by workers in Ghana are revealed in a joint investigation by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism."

This Is How Meta AI Staffers Deemed More Than 7 Million Books to Have No “Economic Value”; Vanity Fair, April 15, 2025

 

KEZIAH WEIR, Vanity Fair; This Is How Meta AI Staffers Deemed More Than 7 Million Books to Have No “Economic Value”

"Last month, I prompted Meta AI with a question: “Is it okay to use pirated books to train AI?” The machine’s response was unequivocal. “Using pirated books to train AI is not okay,” it admonished. “In fact, it’s a serious violation of copyright laws and can have significant consequences for authors and publishers. Recently, it’s been reported that Meta used millions of pirated books to develop its AI programs, which has sparked widespread outrage and condemnation from the writing community.”"

Law professors side with authors battling Meta in AI copyright case; TechCrunch, April 11, 2025

 Kyle Wiggers , TechCrunch; Law professors side with authors battling Meta in AI copyright case

"A group of professors specializing in copyright law has filed an amicus brief in support of authors suing Meta for allegedly training its Llama AI models on e-books without permission.

The brief, filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, calls Meta’s fair use defense “a breathtaking request for greater legal privileges than courts have ever granted human authors.”"

Richard Osman urges writers to ‘have a good go’ at Meta over breaches of copyright; The Guardian, March 25, 2025

 Ella Creamer , The Guardian; Richard Osman urges writers to ‘have a good go’ at Meta over breaches of copyright

"Richard Osman has said that writers will “have a good go” at taking on Meta after it emerged that the company used a notorious database believed to contain pirated books to train artificial intelligence.

“Copyright law is not complicated at all,” the author of The Thursday Murder Club series wrote in a statement on X on Sunday evening. “If you want to use an author’s work you need to ask for permission. If you use it without permission you’re breaking the law. It’s so simple.”

In January, it emerged that Mark Zuckerberg approved his company’s use of The Library Genesis dataset, a “shadow library” that originated in Russia and contains more than 7.5m books. In 2024 a New York federal court ordered LibGen’s anonymous operators to pay a group of publishers $30m (£24m) in damages for copyright infringement. Last week, the Atlantic republished a searchable database of the titles contained in LibGen. In response, authors and writers’ organisations have rallied against Meta’s use of copyrighted works."

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI; The Atlantic, March 20, 2025

 Alex Reisner , The Atlantic; Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI

"Editor’s note: This search tool is part of The Atlantic’s investigation into the Library Genesis data set. You can read an analysis about LibGen and its contents here. Find The Atlantic’s search tool for movie and television writing used to train AI here."

Judge says Meta must defend claim it stripped copyright info from Llama's training fodder; The Register, March 11, 2025

 Thomas Claburn , The Register; Judge says Meta must defend claim it stripped copyright info from Llama's training fodder

"A judge has found Meta must answer a claim it allegedly removed so-called copyright management information from material used to train its AI models.

The Friday ruling by Judge Vince Chhabria concerned the case Kadrey et al vs Meta Platforms, filed in July 2023 in a San Francisco federal court as a proposed class action by authors Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden, who reckon the Instagram titan's use of their work to train its neural networks was illegal.

Their case burbled along until January 2025 when the plaintiffs made the explosive allegation that Meta knew it used copyrighted material for training, and that its AI models would therefore produce results that included copyright management information (CMI) – the fancy term for things like the creator of a copyrighted work, its license and terms of use, its date of creation, and so on, that accompany copyrighted material.

The miffed scribes alleged Meta therefore removed all of this copyright info from the works it used to train its models so users wouldn’t be made aware the results they saw stemmed from copyrighted stuff."

Court filings show Meta paused efforts to license books for AI training; TechCrunch, February 14, 3025

 Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch; Court filings show Meta paused efforts to license books for AI training

"According to one transcript, Sy Choudhury, who leads Meta’s AI partnership initiatives, said that Meta’s outreach to various publishers was met with “very slow uptake in engagement and interest.”

“I don’t recall the entire list, but I remember we had made a long list from initially scouring the Internet of top publishers, et cetera,” Choudhury said, per the transcript, “and we didn’t get contact and feedback from — from a lot of our cold call outreaches to try to establish contact.”

Choudhury added, “There were a few, like, that did, you know, engage, but not many.”

According to the court transcripts, Meta paused certain AI-related book licensing efforts in early April 2023 after encountering “timing” and other logistical setbacks. Choudhury said some publishers, in particular fiction book publishers, turned out to not in fact have the rights to the content that Meta was considering licensing, per a transcript.

“I’d like to point out that the — in the fiction category, we quickly learned from the business development team that most of the publishers we were talking to, they themselves were representing that they did not have, actually, the rights to license the data to us,” Choudhury said. “And so it would take a long time to engage with all their authors.”"

Meta staff torrented nearly 82TB of pirated books for AI training — court records reveal copyright violations; Tom's Hardware, February 9, 2025

 

Jowi Morales

 , Tom's Hardware; Meta staff torrented nearly 82TB of pirated books for AI training — court records reveal copyright violations

"Facebook parent-company Meta is currently fighting a class action lawsuit alleging copyright infringement and unfair competition, among others, with regards to how it trained LLaMA. According to an X (formerly Twitter) post by vx-underground, court records reveal that the social media company used pirated torrents to download 81.7TB of data from shadow libraries including Anna’s Archive, Z-Library, and LibGen. It then used this information to train its AI models.

The evidence, in the form of written communication, shows the researchers’ concerns about Meta’s use of pirated materials. One senior AI researcher said way back in October 2022, “I don’t think we should use pirated material. I really need to draw a line here.” While another one said, “Using pirated material should be beyond our ethical threshold,” then they added, “SciHub, ResearchGate, LibGen are basically like PirateBay or something like that, they are distributing content that is protected by copyright and they’re infringing it.”"

Meta’s Decision to End Fact-Checking Could Have Disastrous Consequences; The New York Times, January 14, 2025

 Sarah Chatta, The New York Times; Meta’s Decision to End Fact-Checking Could Have Disastrous Consequences

"What happens on Meta’s platforms is more than just a matter of company policy. The prevalence of false information on social media and the ease with which it can proliferate have helped fuel division and violence in the United States and abroad. The company’s addictive algorithms were so effective in supercharging posts encouraging ethnic cleansing in Myanmar that Amnesty International called upon Meta to pay reparations to the Rohingya people. (The company said “we have been too slow to prevent misinformation and hate on Facebook” in Myanmar, and eventually took steps to proactively identify and remove posts.)

I first learned the importance of fact-checking while working as a reporter in Sri Lanka in 2018, when an episode of violence tied to Meta’s platforms rocked the country."

Meta Lawyer Lemley Quits AI Case Citing Zuckerberg 'Descent'; Bloomberg Law, January 14, 2026

 

Kyle Jahner

, Bloomberg Law; Meta Lawyer Lemley Quits AI Case Citing Zuckerberg 'Descent'

"California attorney Mark Lemley dropped Meta Platforms Inc. as a client in a high-profile copyright case because of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness,” the Stanford University professor said on LinkedIn."

Mark Zuckerberg Is Done With Politics; The New York Times, September 24, 2024

Theodore Schleifer and Mike Isaac, The New York Times; Mark Zuckerberg Is Done With Politics

"Instead of publicly engaging with Washington, Mr. Zuckerberg is repairing relationships with politicians behind the scenes. After the “Zuckerbucks” criticism, Mr. Zuckerberg hired Brian Baker, a prominent Republican strategist, to improve his positioning with right-wing media and Republican officials. In the lead-up to November’s election, Mr. Baker has emphasized to Mr. Trump and his top aides that Mr. Zuckerberg has no plans to make similar donations, a person familiar with the discussions said.

Mr. Zuckerberg has yet to forge a relationship with Vice President Kamala Harris. But over the summer, Mr. Zuckerberg had his first conversations with Mr. Trump since he left office, according to people familiar with the conversations."

Meta Fails to Block Zuckerberg Deposition in AI Copyright Suit; Bloomberg Law, September 25, 2024

 Aruni Soni, Bloomberg Law; Meta Fails to Block Zuckerberg Deposition in AI Copyright Suit

"A federal magistrate judge opened the door to a deposition of Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a copyright lawsuit over the tech company’s large language model, denying the social media giant’s bid for a protective order.

Magistrate Judge Thomas S. Hixson denied the request to block the deposition because the plaintiffs supplied enough evidence that Zuckerberg is the “chief decision maker and policy setter for Meta’s Generative AI branch and the development of the large language models at issue in this action,” he said in the order filed Tuesday in the US District Court for the Northern District."

Meta bans RT and other Russian state media networks; Reuters, September 17, 2024

 Katie Paul, Reuters; Meta bans RT and other Russian state media networks

"Facebook owner Meta aid on Monday it was banning RT, Rossiya Segodnya and other Russian state media networks from its platforms, claiming the outlets had used deceptive tactics to carry out covert influence operations online.

The ban, strongly criticised by the Kremlin, marks a sharp escalation in measures by the world's biggest social media company against Russian state media, after years of more limited steps such as blocking the outlets from running ads and reducing the reach of their posts."