Five of the country’s largest book and journal publishers along with bestselling author Scott Turow have joined together to file a class action lawsuit against Meta and its founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, for willful infringement of millions of works, torrented via pirate sites, to develop Meta’s Llama large language models.

The plaintiffs in the suit—Elsevier, Cengage Learning, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, and McGraw Hill—publish books and journals that cut across publishing categories.Turow, a past president of the Authors Guild, will serve as a class representative on behalf of authors. The lawsuit, captioned Elsevier Inc. et al. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. and Mark Zuckerberg, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The lawsuit is the first copyright infringement litigation brought against an AI firm by publishers. It also looks to include a proposed class of copyright owners with similar claims against Meta and Zuckerberg. To date, most of the lawsuits have been brought by authors and other creatives, such as the class action lawsuit against Anthropic. The publishers are seeking monetary and injunctive relief, including an order to destroy all infringing copies in Meta’s possession or control.

“The Copyright Act has long been the foundation for safeguarding intellectual property. That protection is needed now more than ever,” said Macmillan CEO Jon Yaged in a statement explaining why the publisher took part in the lawsuit. “It is unconscionable that one of the world’s most valuable companies chose to steal millions of works from creators for its own self-enrichment.”

McGraw Hill president and CEO Philip Moyer said while the publisher believes in the important role AI will play in education, “we also believe in protecting the foundational intellectual property rights of human authors around the globe who create original content. There is a vibrant market for AI companies to license intellectual property, and it is well established that AI models can be built and innovation can flourish without violating these rights.”

The lawsuit attacks Meta’s actions on a number of fronts related to copyright infringement. The suit alleges that illegal copying is hurting efforts to have AI companies sign agreements with publishers to license their content, noting that “Meta briefly considered licensing deals with major publishers,” and between January and April 2023 discussed increasing the company’s “dataset licensing” budget from $17 to $200 million. That idea was dropped, however, when the issue was “escalated” to Zuckerberg and word came down to stop the company’s licensing efforts. The complaint cites a Meta employee describing the reasoning in killing the licensing attempt: “if we license once [sic] single book, we won’t be able to lean into the fair use strategy.”

The complaint also expands on the spreading fear that AI, including Llama, is allowing people to create competing texts with works written by humans. According to the complaint, one user describes prompting a “100-chapter fictional book” from “a single prompt using Llama 3.1 70B.” Another writer released three books in three months and accidentally left in the published text an AI prompt asking it to “rewrite” passages “to align more with” the work of a specific, published author identified by name. Yet another prolific writer, who markets herself as an international bestseller and Amazon Top 10 seller, published 171 books in the last seven years and left a similar AI-prompted snafu in a published book.

“The Association of American Publishers enthusiastically supports this important class action which abundantly illustrates that Meta made calculated decisions to enrich itself with literary properties that it did not create and does not own, when instead it could have partnered with publishers and authors,” said Maria Pallante CEO of the AAP, which is helping with legal issues in the case.

In a statement, the Authors Guild said it “applauds the publishers and the other named plaintiffs for bringing this case, which represents another important step in the fight to hold AI companies accountable for the mass-scale theft of authors’ works,” and is “especially grateful” to Turow for representing the interests of authors in the suit.

This story has been updated.