Meta sued by major book publishers for copyright infringement

Meta is facing a lawsuit filed by five major book publishers and one author on the grounds that the company “engaged in the largest infringement of copyrighted material in history” by training its Llama AI models, such as. was already said by The New York Times. In their suitMacmillan, McGraw-Hill, Elsevier, Hachette, Cengage, and author Scott Turow allege that Meta “repeatedly copied” their books and articles without permission.

The lawsuit accuses Meta of deliberately ripping off copyrighted works from “well-known pirate sites,” such as LibGen, Anna’s Archive, Sci-Hub, Sci-Mag, and others, and then feeding the material into its AI model. It also says that Meta trained Llama with information from within the Common Crawl dataset, which it says is “full of illegal content of copyrighted works.” As a result, Llama “produces a word-for-word replacement” for the copies:

For example, given two short sentences from Cengage’s best-selling book, Calculus: Early Transcendentals, 9th edition, by James Stewart, Llama begins quoting word for word to continue the passage.

A group of authors also sued Anthropic for copyright infringement. When a federal judge ruled that training AI models on legally purchased books without permission is considered a work of justice, he allowed the authors to go ahead with a class action lawsuit on the “millions” of works Anthropic allegedly pirated. Anthropic agreed to pay the authors $1.5 billion last year to settle the case.

Turow and a group of publishers are suing Meta for damages, and are asking the court to order the company to stop its alleged illegal activities. They have also asked the court to ask the company to provide a list of books, newspaper articles, and other copyrighted works in which it has trained its Llama AI models.

“AI is helping to revolutionize productivity, productivity and technology for people and companies, and the courts have found that training AI on copyrighted material can be a fair use,” Meta spokesman Dave Arnold said in a statement. Seaside. “We will fight this case vigorously.”