Meta Wins Legal Challenge Over Use Of Books In AI Training

A federal judge told a group of fiction writers they needed a better strategy to successfully sue Meta for allegations it downloaded their works into a “shadow library” for the purposes of training a generative artificial intelligence model.

Describing such technology as “software products that are capable of generating text, images, videos or sound,” U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in his June 25 opinion noted “companies have been unable to resist the temptation to feed copyright-protected materials into their models — without getting permission from the copyright holders or paying them for the right to use their works for this purpose. This case presents the question whether such conduct is illegal.”

At issue is Meta’s Llama platform, a so-called “large language model,” or LLM, which the Facebook parent company released in February 2023. Meta released Llama 3 in April 2024 and plans a fourth version in 2025. Chhabria said 13 authors — “mostly famous fiction writers” — allege Meta violated copyright protections by downloading their works from illicit sources and feeding the content into Llama’s training module.

On cross motions for summary judgment, the parties clashed over whether Meta’s conduct constituted fair use. Chhabria rejected the authors’ arguments, noting that although Llama can produce small snippets of the authors’ text, it can’t spit out enough to matter, and further said the authors can’t claim a diminished ability to sell their works to LLM developers as they aren’t entitled to that market.