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Five major global publishers and author Scott Turow filed a class-action lawsuit against Meta Platforms in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, alleging that the tech giant engaged in “one of the most massive infringements of copyrighted materials in history”.
The coalition, comprising Elsevier, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Hachette and Cengage, accuses Meta of pirating millions of books and journal articles to train its Llama large language models.
The complaint alleges that Meta knowingly sourced copyrighted works from “notorious pirate sites,” including LibGen and Sci-Hub, to feed its AI systems.
The publishers argue that by using these unauthorized datasets, the Llama model has become capable of generating “verbatim and near-verbatim substitutes” for their original content. To illustrate this, the suit notes that when prompted with a short excerpt from a Cengage calculus textbook, the AI began reproducing the text word-for-word.
Works cited in the filing range from specialised scientific journals to popular novels such as The Wild Robot by Peter Brown and The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin. Maria Pallante, president of the Association of American Publishers, stated that AI should not be released by tech companies that “prioritise pirate sites over scholarship and imagination”.
Meta has denied any wrongdoing and vowed to fight the lawsuit “aggressively”. A spokesperson for the company argued that training AI on copyrighted material qualifies as “fair use” under existing law, asserting that the technology powers transformative innovations and creativity for users.
This legal action marks a significant escalation in the broader conflict between the creative industry and Big Tech. While some companies, such as Anthropic, recently opted to settle a similar class-action suit for $1.5 billion, Meta appears intent on seeking a definitive court ruling.
The outcome of this case is expected to hinge on whether the courts view the ingestion of copyrighted works as a transformative “fair use” or as a direct infringement that threatens the commercial viability of authors and publishers.
The plaintiffs are currently seeking an unspecified amount in monetary damages and permission to represent a broader class of copyright owners.
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