March 27, 2025 Story by: Editor
March 25 (Reuters) – Meta Platforms (META.O) has requested a U.S. court to confirm that it did not infringe copyright laws when utilizing books by writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, comedian Sarah Silverman, and others to train its artificial intelligence system.
On Monday, Meta urged a federal judge in San Francisco to dismiss the authors’ lawsuit, arguing that the company’s use of these books to develop its large language model, Llama, falls under the “fair use” doctrine.
Fair use has become a pivotal issue in ongoing copyright disputes, with authors, artists, and news organizations suing major tech firms over AI training data.
Meta’s spokesperson emphasized the importance of fair use, stating it is “vital” to the company’s “transformational GenAI open-source LLMs that are powering incredible innovation, productivity, and creativity.”
The lawsuit, filed in 2023, alleges that Meta used pirated copies of the authors’ books without consent to train Llama. However, Meta countered that its AI training practices are legally protected under fair use, which permits unauthorized use of copyrighted material in certain circumstances.
Meta argued that Llama’s training process is transformative, enabling the AI to function as “a personal tutor on nearly any subject, assist with creative ideation, and help users generate business reports, translate conversations, analyze data, write code, and compose poems or letters to friends.”
“What it does not do is replicate Plaintiffs’ books or substitute for reading them,” Meta stated in its filing.
Earlier this month, the authors requested the court to reject Meta’s fair use defense, asserting that the company deliberately exploited copyrighted content without compensation.
“Meta wanted books for their expressive content — the very subject matter copyright law protects,” the authors argued. “But instead of paying rights holders, Meta systematically took and fed entire copies of pirated works into its LLMs to extract that expressive content without having to pay.”
The case, Kadrey v. Meta Platforms Inc., is being heard in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Case No. 3:23-cv-03417.
Legal Representation:
- For the authors: David Boies (Boies Schiller Flexner), Joseph Saveri (Joseph Saveri Law Firm), Rachel Geman (Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein), Amy Keller (DiCello Levitt), Bryan Clobes (Cafferty Clobes Meriwether & Sprengel), Matthew Butterick.
For Meta: Bobby Ghajar, Kathleen Hartnett, Mark Weinstein (Cooley), Angela Dunning (Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton), Kannon Shanmugam (Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison).
Source: Reuters
