In a federal class action lawsuit filed Tuesday (May 5), publishing houses Elsevier, Cengage Learning, Hachette, Macmillan, and McGraw Hill accused Meta and founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg of violating copyright laws through “willful infringement” of millions of books and journal articles.
“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,” the publishers said in a Tuesday news release.
The plaintiffs, who are joined by bestselling legal thriller author Scott Turow, said in the release that Meta deliberately used books and journal articles because they possess characteristics uniquely suited to training large language models.
The lawsuit argued that the risk of Llama competing with works by human authors is not just theoretical. One user described creating a “100-chapter fictional book” from “a single prompt using Llama 3.1 70B!”
According to a Tuesday (May 5) Reuters report, a Meta spokesperson said the company will “aggressively” fight the publishers’ claims.
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“AI 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 spokesperson said.
The lawsuit is the latest in a string of legal actions filed by authors, media outlets and publishers against AI companies.
In March, Encyclopedia Britannica and its subsidiary Merriam-Webster sued OpenAI, alleging the startup committed copyright infringement by scraping their articles to train ChatGPT.
Meanwhile, some tech giants, including Amazon and Microsoft, are working on deals with media companies in which those publishers would be compensated when their materials are used for AI training.
“Publishers increasingly favor usage-based compensation models that scale with how often AI systems rely on their content, rather than flat licensing fees,” PYMNTS reported in February. “Industry executives say such models could offer a more sustainable revenue stream as artificial intelligence usage grows, but many also worry that AI companies may not participate in sufficient numbers to make marketplaces economically meaningful.”
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