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A team of professors specializing in copyright law has filed an amicus brief in support of authors suing Meta for the alleged AI copyright infringement. The professional association joined the case regarding training the Llama AI models on e-books without permission.
The law teachers filed the brief challenging Meta on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division. They address Meta’s fair use defence as “a breathtaking request for greater legal privileges than courts have ever granted human authors.”
The brief reads that the use of copyrighted works, as alleged in the AI copyright infringement suit, is to train generative models. But that’s not transformative. This is because using works for that purpose is not significantly different from using them to educate human authors. Interestingly, they added that such is the principal original purpose of all of the works.
Particularly, the brief reads: “That training use is also not transformative. This is also because its purpose is to enable the creation of works that compete with the copied works in the same markets. However, its purpose is that when pursued by a for-profit company like Meta, it makes the use undeniably commercial.”
The global trade association for academic and professional publishers also filed an amicus brief on Friday to support the authors. The Copyright Alliance, which represents a broad range of copyright disciplines, including the American Publishers, also filed against the AI copywriting infringement.
A Meta spokesperson said the amicus briefs filed by the law professors and the Electronic Frontier Foundation last week were to support the tech giant’s legal position.
In the case of Kadrey v. Meta, authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates have alleged that Meta was guilty of AI copyright infringement. This also extends to their intellectual property rights by using their e-books to train models. However, the company removed the copyright information from those e-books to hide the alleged infringement. Meta, meanwhile, contended that it only trained in line with the fair use policy. Therefore, the case should be dismissed because the authors lack standing to sue.
Sometimes, last month, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria allowed the case to proceed. However, he dismissed a part of it. In his ruling, Chhabria wrote that the allegation of copyright infringement is “obviously a concrete injury sufficient for standing.” He added that the authors have also “adequately alleged that Meta intentionally removed CMI copyright management information.” He added that Meta did it to conceal AI copyright infringement.”
The courts are currently hearing several AI copyright lawsuits, including The New York Times’ suit against OpenAI.
