Meta Faces Copyright Infringement Lawsuit in France Over AI Training

Meta is facing a copyright infringement lawsuit in France brought by trade associations representing publishers and authors, who accuse the company of training its generative artificial intelligence model on their books without permission.

Publishers’ trade association SNE, authors’ association SGDL and writers’ union SNAC brought the suit in a Paris court focused on intellectual property, Bloomberg reported Wednesday (March 12).

SNE President Vincent Montagne told a press conference Wednesday that the group has also told the European Commission that Meta’s actions violated European Union rules, according to the report.

Meta did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

Tech companies have faced a wave of legal challenges over using copyrighted materials in developing AI tools.

Defendants in these cases, including Meta, have largely argued that their practices fall under the doctrine of “fair use,” which allows limited use of copyrighted works under certain circumstances.

It was reported in January that Meta was facing a lawsuit in a California court alleging that the tech giant knowingly used pirated books to train its AI systems. The lawsuit, originally filed in 2023, was brought by prominent figures including author Ta-Nehisi Coates and comedian Sarah Silverman.

In February, a group of news publishers sued AI firm Cohere for copyright infringement in a federal court in New York, accusing the company of improperly using at least 4,000 copyrighted works to train its AI large language model and of displaying large portions of articles while bypassing visits to the publishers’ websites.

“Our content is being stored and used to create verbatim and substitutional copies of our material,” said Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News Media Alliance, which organized the suit on behalf of its members.

A spokesperson for Cohere told PYMNTS at the time that the company stands by its training practices and prioritizes controls to reduce the risk of intellectual property infringement.

“We would have welcomed a conversation about their specific concerns — and the opportunity to explain our enterprise-focused approach — rather than learning about them in a filing,” the spokesperson said. “We believe this lawsuit is misguided and frivolous, and [we] expect this matter to be resolved in our favor.”

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