A federal judge sided with Meta on Wednesday in a lawsuit brought against the company by 13 book authors, including Sarah Silverman, that alleged the company had illegally trained its AI models on their copyrighted works.<\/p>\n
Federal Judge Vince Chhabria issued a summary judgment<\/a> \u2014 meaning the judge was able to decide on the case without sending it to a jury \u2014 in favor of Meta, finding that the company\u2019s training of AI models on copyrighted books in this case fell under the \u201cfair use\u201d doctrine of copyright law and thus was legal.<\/p>\n The decision comes just a few days after a federal judge sided with Anthropic<\/a> in a similar lawsuit. Together, these cases are shaping up to be a win for the tech industry, which has spent years in legal battles with media companies arguing that training AI models on copyrighted works is fair use.<\/p>\n However, these decisions aren\u2019t the sweeping wins some companies hoped for \u2014 both judges noted that their cases were limited in scope.<\/p>\n Judge Chhabria made clear that this decision does not mean that all AI model training on copyrighted works is legal, but rather that the plaintiffs in this case \u201cmade the wrong arguments\u201d and failed to develop sufficient evidence in support of the right ones.<\/p>\n \u201cThis ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta\u2019s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,\u201d Judge Chhabria said in his decision. Later, he said, \u201cIn cases involving uses like Meta\u2019s, it seems like the plaintiffs will often win, at least where those cases have better-developed records on the market effects of the defendant\u2019s use.\u201d<\/p>\n Judge Chhabria ruled that Meta\u2019s use of copyrighted works in this case was transformative \u2014 meaning the company\u2019s AI models did not merely reproduce the authors\u2019 books.<\/p>\n Furthermore, the plaintiffs failed to convince the judge that Meta\u2019s copying of the books harmed the market for those authors, which is a key factor in determining whether copyright law has been violated.<\/p>\n \u201cThe plaintiffs presented no meaningful evidence on market dilution at all,\u201d said Judge Chhabria.<\/p>\n Both Anthropic and Meta\u2019s wins involve training AI models on books, but there are several other active lawsuits against technology companies for training AI models on other copyrighted works. For instance, The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft<\/a> for training AI models on news articles, while Disney and Universal are suing Midjourney<\/a> for training AI models on films and TV shows.<\/p>\n Judge Chhabria noted in his decision that fair use defenses depend heavily on the details of a case, and some industries may have stronger fair use arguments than others.<\/p>\n \u201cIt seems that markets for certain types of works (like news articles) might be even more vulnerable to indirect competition from AI outputs,\u201d said Chhabria.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A federal judge sided with Meta on Wednesday in a lawsuit brought against the company by 13 book…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":14968,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[15249,64,340,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-14967","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-ai-training-data","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-meta","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114747019384930164","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}