Five major book publishers and author Scott Turow filed a class action lawsuit against Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a US District Court in New York. They accuse the company of illegally using millions of copyrighted works to train its Llama AI models. Meta defends the practice as fair use.
Academic and entertainment publishers, including McGraw-Hill, Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, and Macmillan, along with Scott Turow, a best-selling author and former Authors Guild president, launched the lawsuit on Tuesday. The complaint alleges that Meta '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.' It specifically names Zuckerberg, claiming he 'personally authorized and actively encouraged' the infringement to train Llama models on scientific journals, textbooks, and books. The plaintiffs describe this as 'one of the most massive infringements of copyrighted materials in history.' Meta's AI, they argue, now generates substitutes for their works at speed and scale. The American Association of Publishers stated, 'Meta chose to live by its motto of “move fast, and break things,” and now must be held accountable for what it broke, including the copyright laws.' Scott Turow told The New York Times, 'I find it distressing and infuriating that one of the top-10 richest corporations in the world knowingly used pirated copies of my books... to train Llama, which can and has produced competing material, including works supposedly in my style.' Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold responded, 'Courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use. We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.' This follows previous lawsuits where Meta and Anthropic successfully defended similar claims, though judges noted potential market harm to human authors. The case raises ongoing questions about AI training data and fair use under copyright law.
