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A federal judge has recently allowed an AI lawsuit against Meta for copyright concerns.
As made known in the case of Kadrey v. Meta, Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, among other authors, alleged that Meta violated their intellectual property rights by using their books to train Llama AI models.
The authors also said in the AI lawsuit against Meta that the company removed the copyright information from their books to hide the alleged infringement.
In contrast, Meta claimed that its training qualifies as fair use, and it argued that the case should be dismissed because the authors lack the legal right to sue. In court last month, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria indicated he was against the AI lawsuit against Meta’s dismissal. Still, he also criticized what he saw as “over-the-top” rhetoric from the authors’ legal teams.
In Friday’s ruling, Chhabria wrote that the allegation of copyright infringement is “obviously a concrete injury sufficient for standing” and that the authors have also “adequately alleged that Meta intentionally removed CMI [copyright management information] to conceal copyright infringement.”
“Taken together, these allegations raise a ‘reasonable, if not particularly strong, inference’ that Meta removed CMI to try to prevent Llama from outputting CMI and thus revealing it was trained on copyrighted material,” Chhabria wrote.
The judge did, however, dismiss the authors’ claims related to the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA) because they did not “allege that Meta accessed their computers or servers—only their data (in the form of their books), as contained in the AI lawsuit.”
The AI lawsuit has already provided a few glimpses into how Meta approaches copyright, with court filings from the plaintiffs claiming that Mark Zuckerberg gave the Llama team permission to train the models using copyrighted works and that other Meta team members discussed the use of legally questionable content for AI training.
Several AI copyright lawsuits before the court, including The New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI.
