Judge Allows Authors’ AI Copyright Case Against Meta to Proceed
March 10, 2025
Meta’s AI training practices are about to face legal scrutiny, as a judge has allowed a copyright infringement case against the company to proceed.
The lawsuit, filed by authors Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden and comedian Sarah Silverman in July 2023, accuses Meta of using material from their copyrighted books to train its Llama AI model. Other authors, including Ta-Nehisi Coates, joined the case a few months later.
The plaintiffs claim that some of Llama’s responses were pulled directly from their work without consent, enriching Meta in the process. They additionally claim that Meta removed copyright management information (CMI), such as ISBNs, copyright symbols, and disclaimers, to hide their infringement.
As noted by TechCrunch, Meta has tried unsuccessfully to get the case dismissed. In his Friday ruling, Judge Vince Chhabria allowed the case to proceed, stating: “Copyright infringement is obviously a concrete injury sufficient for standing.” He also said that there’s a “reasonable, if not particularly strong, inference that Meta removed CMI to try to prevent Llama from outputting CMI and thus revealing that it was trained on copyrighted material.”
Judge Chhabria did dismiss one of the plaintiffs’ claims, which cited the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA), because the authors did not “allege that Meta accessed their computers or servers — only their data.”
The ruling comes a month after Thomson Reuters secured a first-of-its-kind win in an AI copyright lawsuit. A judge dismissed Ross Intelligence’s fair use claim since it affected the market value of Thomson Reuters’ copyrighted material.
Like Meta, multiple AI companies are facing lawsuits for copyright violations. The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft; News Corp. has sued Perplexity; and several large Canadian news organizations have sued OpenAI.
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