Meta and Zuckerberg sued by publishers over ‘massive’ copyright infringement

Meta and its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg face a lawsuit from a coalition of major publishers, alleging the social media platform illegally used copyrighted works to train its Llama AI models.

Five publishers — Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage — along with bestselling author Scott Turow, are suing the Big Tech company and its founder over “one of the most massive infringements of copyrighted materials in history”. 

According to the filing to the Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, Meta accessed millions of copyrighted books and journal articles from websites hosting pirated material, and also downloaded unauthorised scrapes of “virtually the entire internet” in order to train its generative AI models. 

The $1.5tn company then reproduced and distributed the material without permission, the filing said. The plaintiffs also claim Zuckerberg “himself personally authorised and actively encouraged the infringement”, and that the company deliberately stripped the works of attribution data in order to conceal its training sources. 

The case is the latest in a string of fierce copyright battles filed by artists, authors and newspapers alleging that AI groups such as Microsoft and OpenAI have used copyrighted content without compensation or permission to train their chatbots. 

Last year, AI start-up Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5bn to settle a copyright lawsuit over its use of pirated texts to train its models. 

However, in June, Meta won a similar copyright lawsuit brought by authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Kadrey. Here, the judge ruled that the plaintiffs had not provided enough evidence that the company’s AI would harm the market for human-created content by flooding it with AI-generated works, calling this a “potentially winning argument”. Meta’s usage of the copyrighted material was therefore found to be “fair use” for developing a transformative technology. 

In a statement on Tuesday, Meta said it would fight the latest lawsuit “aggressively”, adding: “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.” 

According to the lawsuit, Meta initially sought to negotiate licensing deals with publishers but abandoned them on “Zuckerberg’s personal instruction”. 

The publishers argue that authors have been harmed because Llama has been used to produce imitation versions of their works, calling the technology “an infinite substitution machine”.

They added that AI-generated books were “already flooding the world’s largest book marketplace, Amazon, in volumes that materially displace human-authored works”.

The plaintiffs are seeking unspecified damages and aim to represent a broader group of copyright owners.