Five publishing houses and author Scott Turow sued Meta Platforms and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, alleging the company used millions of copyrighted works without permission to train its AI model Llama.
The class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, accuses Meta of copyright infringement and alleges Zuckerberg personally authorised the use of the materials.
“Defendants reproduced and distributed millions of copyrighted works without permission, without providing any compensation to authors or publishers, and with full knowledge that their conduct violated copyright law,” the complaint states. It adds that “Zuckerberg himself personally authorised and actively encouraged the infringement.”
In a statement, Meta said it would “fight this lawsuit aggressively.”
“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,” the company said.
The plaintiffs include publishers Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers and McGraw Hill.
Authors published by the companies include Turow, James Patterson, Donna Tartt, former US President Joe Biden, and Pulitzer Prize winners Yiyun Li and Amanda Vaill.
The case adds to a growing number of lawsuits filed by authors and publishers against AI developers over the use of copyrighted material in training generative AI systems.
