Judge allows authors’ AI copyright lawsuit against Meta to move forward

# meta # llama

A federal judge has decided to allow a copyright lawsuit against Meta to proceed, though he dismissed a portion of the case. In the lawsuit titled Kadrey vs. Meta, authors such as Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates claim that Meta infringed on their intellectual property by using their books to train its Llama AI models. They further allege that Meta stripped the copyright information from these books to conceal the infringement. On the other hand, Meta argues that its use of the material falls under fair use and sought to have the case dismissed, claiming the authors lack the legal standing to sue. During last month's court session, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria hinted at his reluctance to dismiss the case but also took issue with what he described as "over-the-top" rhetoric from the authors' lawyers. In his ruling on Friday, Judge Chhabria stated that the claim of copyright infringement constitutes a "concrete injury sufficient for standing." He also found that the authors had sufficiently alleged that Meta deliberately removed copyright management information (CMI) to hide the infringement. Chhabria noted, "Taken together, these allegations raise a 'reasonable, if not particularly strong inference' that Meta removed CMI to try to prevent Llama from outputting CMI and thus revealing it was trained on copyrighted material." However, the judge dismissed the authors' claims under the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA), reasoning that the authors did not claim that Meta accessed their computers or servers, but only their data in the form of their books. The lawsuit has shed some light on Meta's approach to copyright issues, with court documents from the plaintiffs suggesting that Mark Zuckerberg approved the use of copyrighted works for training the Llama models, and that other Meta team members discussed using legally questionable content for AI training. Currently, the courts are handling several AI-related copyright lawsuits, including one filed by The New York Times against OpenAI.

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