Meta just walked away with a win in a heated copyright lawsuit over its AI training practices — but it’s not the slam-dunk Big Tech might’ve hoped for.
On Wednesday, Judge Vince Chhabria ruled in Meta’s favor in a lawsuit brought by 13 authors. The authors claimed Meta illegally trained its AI models, including LLaMA, on their copyrighted books without permission.
But Judge Chhabria sided with Meta, writing that the company is “entitled to summary judgment on its fair use defense to the claim that copying these plaintiffs’ books for use as LLM training data was infringement.”
💥 That’s a big legal win — but not an all-clear. The judge made it very clear this ruling doesn’t give Meta or other AI companies a free pass.
“This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,” Chhabria said.
“It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.”
Oof. Translation: Meta won this round, but the underlying issue is still very much up for debate.
This comes just a day after Anthropic (another major AI player) scored its own fair use victory in a separate case. In that ruling, a judge determined that training AI models on legally purchased copies of books qualifies as fair use.
Back in the Meta case, Judge Chhabria didn’t hold back in critiquing some of the authors’ main arguments. He called two of their claims “clear losers” — namely, that:
- LLaMA could reproduce snippets of their books, and
- That Meta’s actions undermined the authors’ ability to license their work for AI training.
“Llama is not capable of generating enough text from the plaintiffs’ books to matter, and the plaintiffs are not entitled to the market for licensing their works as AI training data,” the judge wrote.
There was one argument that the judge said might’ve had a shot — the idea that Meta’s copying could lead to a wave of AI-generated works flooding the market, potentially diluting demand for the originals.
But the plaintiffs, the judge noted, didn’t bring enough evidence to back it up.
He also referenced the Anthropic ruling and added that Judge William Alsup had similarly “brushed aside concerns about the harm generative AI could ‘inflict on the market for the works it gets trained on.’”
Bottom Line: Meta scored a major legal win here, but it’s hardly a final verdict on whether Big Tech can freely train AI on copyrighted books. The courts are still figuring it out — and future lawsuits could play out very differently if better arguments (and stronger evidence) are brought to the table.
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