A group of professors specializing in copyright law has submitted an amicus brief to support authors who have filed a lawsuit against Meta. The lawsuit alleges that Meta’s Llama AI models were trained on e-books without obtaining permission from the authors. This brief was presented on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, located in San Francisco. The brief characterizes Meta’s fair use defense as “a breathtaking request for greater legal privileges than courts have ever granted human authors.”
The document further argues that utilizing copyrighted works to train generative models is not "transformative" because it does not differ in a relevant way from using these works to educate human authors, one of the primary original purposes of their creation. Additionally, the brief states that this training use is not "transformative" as its goal is to produce works that would compete in the same markets as the copied works. This pursuit, especially by a for-profit company like Meta, renders the use indisputably "commercial."
Similarly, the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers, a global trade association representing academic and professional publishers, also submitted an amicus brief in support of the suing authors on Friday. Other organizations, including the Copyright Alliance—a nonprofit organization advocating for artists across various copyright sectors—and the Association of American Publishers, submitted their supporting briefs as well.
A Meta spokesperson highlighted to TechCrunch that additional amicus briefs were filed last week by a smaller group of law professors and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, backing Meta’s legal standing.
In the ongoing case, Kadrey v. Meta, authors such as Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates have accused Meta of breaching their intellectual property rights by using their e-books to train AI models. They further claim that Meta removed copyright information from these e-books to obscure the alleged infringement. Meta has countered these claims, insisting that its training process falls under fair use and arguing that the lawsuit should be dismissed due to the authors’ lack of standing.
Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria permitted the case to proceed, although he dismissed parts of it. In his ruling, Judge Chhabria stated that the copyright infringement allegation constituted “obviously a concrete injury sufficient for standing,” and noted that the authors have also "adequately alleged that Meta intentionally removed CMI [copyright management information] to conceal copyright infringement."
Courts are currently deliberating numerous AI-related copyright lawsuits, including a case involving The New York Times against OpenAI.
Updated 8:36 p.m. Pacific: Included references to additional amicus briefs filed on Friday.
