Meta and Zuckerberg Sued for Massive Copyright Infringement in AI Training

Five major publishers—Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier, and Cengage—along with author Scott Turow have filed a class-action lawsuit against Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, alleging that the company illegally used millions of copyrighted books and journal articles to train its AI language model Llama. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, claims that Meta removed copyright management information from the works and accessed pirated material. It asserts that Zuckerberg "personally authorized" the infringement, following Meta's motto "move fast and break things." Meta has vowed to fight the lawsuit, arguing that training AI on copyrighted material qualifies as fair use. The case follows a recent settlement in which Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to authors for similar claims, the largest publicly reported copyright recovery. Legal experts suggest this settlement may influence future cases, though it does not set precedent. Other ongoing lawsuits include artists' class actions against AI image generators Stable Diffusion and Midjourney.