Five major publishers \u2014 Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage \u2014 and the best-selling novelist Scott Turow have filed a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta and its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.<\/p>\n
The complaint<\/a>, which was filed on Tuesday morning in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses Meta and Zuckerberg of illegally using millions of copyrighted works to train their artificial intelligence program Llama, and of removing copyright notices and other copyright management information from those works.<\/p>\n The lawsuit asserts that Meta\u2019s engineers relied on pirated books and journal articles to train the program by downloading unlicensed copies through websites like Anna\u2019s Archive, an open source search engine for piracy sites including LibGen and Sci-Hub. The suit also claims that \u201cZuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cA.I. is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training A.I. on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use,\u201d a Meta spokesman, Dave Arnold, told The Times. \u201cWe will fight this lawsuit aggressively.\u201d<\/p>\n The plaintiffs argue that Meta\u2019s A.I. program poses a threat to the livelihoods of writers and publishers because the technology can be used to quickly produce A.I.-generated copycat books and to summarize the plot and themes of copyrighted books in such great detail that readers don\u2019t have to buy them.<\/p>\n \u201cThese A.I.-generated books are already flooding the world\u2019s largest book marketplace, Amazon, in volumes that materially displace human-authored works,\u201d the complaint states. The filing cites several authors whose works the plaintiffs claim were used to train Llama, including V.E. Schwab, N.K. Jemisin, Lemony Snicket and Turow.<\/p>\n Some of the evidence cited in the complaint purportedly comes directly from Llama. When asked to produce a travel guide in the style of the writer Becky Lomax, Llama rapidly produced \u201ca convincing rendition of Lomax\u2019s local insider voice,\u201d the complaint says. Then, when asked how it was able to reproduce Lomax\u2019s style so accurately, Llama allegedly replied, \u201cWhile I don\u2019t have personal interactions with Becky Lomax, I\u2019ve been trained on a vast amount of text data, including her published works.\u201d<\/p>\n Llama is also able to summarize books in detail. When asked to give a synopsis of Turow\u2019s \u201cPresumed Innocent,\u201d Llama confirmed that it had \u201cbeen trained on a digital version of the book, which allows me to access and analyze its content,\u201d according to the complaint.<\/p>\n In an email to The Times, Turow said Meta\u2019s use of pirated works amounted to \u201cshameless, damaging and unjust behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI find it distressing and infuriating that one of the top-10 richest corporations in the world knowingly used pirated copies of my books, and thousands of other authors, to train Llama, which can and has produced competing material, including works supposedly in my style,\u201d Turow wrote.<\/p>\n By producing \u201cknockoffs and imitations\u201d of authors\u2019 works, Meta\u2019s A.I. program could \u201cdilute the overall market for literary works,\u201d the plaintiffs argue.<\/p>\n \u201cThese outputs are similar enough to copyrighted works \u2014 in subject matter, plot details, sequencing of events, character names and traits, or other creative choices \u2014 that they replace the original work for many readers or consumers,\u201d the complaint says.<\/p>\n The lawsuit is the latest effort by authors and publishers to rein in tech companies\u2019 use of copyrighted works to train their large language models.<\/p>\n Writers have brought lawsuits<\/a> against tech companies including OpenAI<\/a>, Anthropic, Google and xAI<\/a> for the companies\u2019 unauthorized use of their work. Last fall, Anthropic agreed to pay a $1.5 billion settlement<\/a> to writers whose books had been used to train its A.I. program.<\/p>\n (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft<\/a>, as well as Perplexity<\/a>, accusing the companies of copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies have rebutted the claims.)<\/p>\n Authors have challenged Meta in court before<\/a>. In June 2025, a judge ruled in Meta\u2019s favor<\/a>, finding that the plaintiffs had not presented enough evidence that Meta\u2019s A.I. product would create \u201cmarket dilution\u201d by producing a flood of A.I.-generated books.<\/p>\n The lawsuit filed on Tuesday against Meta brought together trade and education publishers, academic publishers of scientific and medical journals and a best-selling author of legal thrillers. The plaintiffs are seeking an order requiring Meta to destroy all illegally acquired copies of works copyrighted by the plaintiffs that Meta used in A.I. training and to \u201ccease all unlawful activities,\u201d as well as requesting any \u201cfurther relief as the Court deems proper.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re focused on a much more sustainable A.I. landscape \u2014 something that\u2019s transparent and fair and participatory and has guardrails against harm for authors and publishers,\u201d said Maria A. Pallante, president and chief executive of the Association of American Publishers, a trade group that acts as a law and policy advocate for the book publishing industry. \u201cThe harm is already evident.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Five major publishers \u2014 Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage \u2014 and the best-selling novelist Scott Turow…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24932,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[458,15266,15272,12993,15267,15271,15268,8,15269,12984,15270,1125,9,6240,12857,7,15273,12983],"class_list":{"0":"post-24931","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-top-stories","8":"tag-artificial-intelligence","9":"tag-book-trade-and-publishing","10":"tag-cengage-group","11":"tag-computers-and-the-internet","12":"tag-copyrights-and-copyright-violations","13":"tag-elsevier-group","14":"tag-hachette-book-group","15":"tag-headlines","16":"tag-macmillan-publishers","17":"tag-mark-e","18":"tag-mcgraw-hill-financial-inc","19":"tag-meta-platforms-inc","20":"tag-news","21":"tag-scott","22":"tag-suits-and-litigation-civil","23":"tag-top-stories","24":"tag-turow","25":"tag-zuckerberg"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@news\/116523903292134412","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24931\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}