Five of the country\u2019s 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\u2019s Llama large language models. <\/p>\n
The plaintiffs in the suit\u2014Elsevier, Cengage Learning, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, and McGraw Hill\u2014publish 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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/a>The publishers are seeking monetary and injunctive relief, including an order to destroy all infringing copies in Meta\u2019s possession or control.<\/p>\n “The Copyright Act has long been the foundation for safeguarding intellectual property. That protection is needed now more than ever,\u201d said Macmillan CEO Jon Yaged in a statement explaining why the publisher took part in the lawsuit. \u201cIt is unconscionable that one of the world\u2019s most valuable companies chose to steal millions of works from creators for its own self-enrichment.\u201d<\/p>\n McGraw Hill president and CEO Philip Moyer said while the publisher believes in the important role AI will play in education, \u201cwe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n The lawsuit attacks Meta\u2019s 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 \u201c<\/a>Meta briefly considered licensing deals with major publishers,\u201d and between January and April 2023 discussed increasing the company\u2019s \u201cdataset licensing\u201d budget from $17 to $200 million. That idea was dropped, however, when the issue was \u201cescalated\u201d to Zuckerberg and word came down to stop the company\u2019s licensing efforts. The complaint cites a Meta employee describing the reasoning in killing the licensing attempt: \u201cif we license once [sic] single book, we won\u2019t be able to lean into the fair use strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n