![\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1778219730_942_64d714b4a92172f33e9b7411a4d81604.jpeg\")
(AFP\/Getty) <\/p>\n (AFP\/Getty) <\/p>\n
Meta<\/a> and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg <\/a>are facing a class action lawsuit from five publishing houses and author Scott Turow, who allege the tech giant illegally used millions of copyrighted works to train its artificial intelligence system, Llama.<\/p>\n Filed in a federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday, the legal action accuses Meta of widespread copyright infringement, marking a significant escalation in the ongoing dispute between the literary world and AI developers.<\/p>\n The plaintiffs contend that Mr Zuckerberg and Meta “followed their well-known motto \u2018move fast and break things\u2019” by illicitly drawing upon a vast collection of books and journal articles for Llama\u2019s development.<\/p>\n \u201cDefendants 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,\u201d the complaint reads in part.<\/p>\n \u201cZuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement.”<\/p>\n Authors published by the five companies suing \u2014 Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan and McGraw Hill \u2014 include Turow, James Patterson, Donna Tartt, former President Joe Biden and at least two of the Pulitzer Prize winners announced Monday, Yiyun Li and Amanda Vaill.<\/p>\n In a statement Monday, Meta vowed to \u201cfight this lawsuit aggressively.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAI 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 statement reads in part.<\/p>\n The lawsuit opens a new front in the ongoing copyright battle between creators and tech companies over AI training, in which dozens of authors, news outlets, visual artists and other plaintiffs have sued companies including Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic for infringement.<\/p>\n All of the pending cases will likely \u200crevolve around whether AI systems make fair use of copyrighted \u200bmaterial by using it to create new, transformative content.<\/p>\n The \u200cfirst two judges to consider the matter \u2060issued diverging rulings last year.<\/p>\n Amazon- and Google-backed Anthropic was \u2060the first major AI company to settle one of the cases, agreeing last year to \u200cpay a group of authors $1.5 \u200bbillion to resolve a class-action \u200clawsuit that could have cost the company \u200bbillions more in damages for alleged piracy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(AFP\/Getty) Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg are facing a class action lawsuit from five publishing houses and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61979,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[154],"tags":[35081,35078,35083,35082,35080,618,994,35079],"class_list":["post-61978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mark-zuckerberg","tag-artificial-intelligence-system","tag-class-action-lawsuit","tag-copyright-infringement","tag-copyright-law","tag-copyrighted-works","tag-mark-zuckerberg","tag-meta","tag-scott-turow"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116537414344967373","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61978\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} In a statement Monday, Meta vowed to \u201cfight this lawsuit aggressively\u201d (AP) <\/p>\n