Matt O’Brien and Barbara Ortutay
A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit from a group of authors who sided with Facebook’s parent meta platform and accused the company of stealing the work to train its artificial intelligence technology.
The ruling from US District Judge Vince Chabli was second in a week from a federal court in San Francisco to dismiss major copyright claims from the author against the rapidly developing AI industry.
Chhabri discovers that the 13 authors who sued Meta “had a false argument” and throws the case. However, the judge also said the ruling was limited to the authors of the case and does not mean that it is legal for Meta to use copyrighted material.
The plaintiff’s lawyers — a group of well-known writers including comedian Sarah Silverman and writers Jacqueline Woodson and Tanehishi Coates — did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday. Meta also did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
“The ruling does not represent the proposition that Meta uses copyrighted material to train language models,” wrote Chhabri. “It only represents the proposition that these plaintiffs had made the wrong argument and were unable to develop a record in favor of the right thing.”
On Monday, US District Judge William Alsap ruled that the humanity of the AI company did not break the law by training chatbot Claude on millions of copyrighted books, but the company still has to go to trial to illegally obtain those books from the pirate website instead of buying them.
However, the actual process of AI systems distilled from thousands of written works is a “typical transformation,” and therefore can allow for the creation of their own texts that are certified as “fair use” under US copyright law, Alsup writes.
In his Meta ruling, Chhabria criticized Alsup’s inference on artificial cases, claiming that “Alsup focused on the transformative nature of the generated AI, putting aside concerns about the harm that it causes to the market for its trained work.”
Chhabria suggested that such harm could be filed.
In Meta’s case, the authors argued in court filing that Meta was “liable for large-scale copyright infringement” by obtaining the book from a pirated online repository and supplying it to Meta’s flagship generative AI system llama.
Long, clearly written textual text, as seen in books, is extremely useful in teaching generative AI chatbots to human language patterns. The author’s lawyers argued that “meta should have paid” to purchase and license these literary works.
Meta rebutted in a court application that US copyright laws “allowing the illegal copy of the work to be transformed into new ones,” and that the new AI-generated representations coming out of chatbots are fundamentally different from trained books.
“After nearly two years of lawsuits, there is no evidence that anyone has used llamas as an alternative to reading plaintiffs’ books, or even what they can do,” argued Meta’s lawyer.
Meta says that the llama will not output the actual work that it copied, even if asked to do so.
“You can’t use llamas to read Sara Silverman’s childhood descriptions or the story of Junot Diaz, a Dominican boy who grew up in New Jersey,” the lawyer wrote.
Meta, accused of pulling these books from online “Shadow Libraries,” claims that the method used “has nothing to do with the nature and purpose of its use,” and that the results would be the same as if the company had instead signed a contract with the actual library.
Such a transaction is how Google built an online Google Books repository of over 20 million books, but also fought a decade of legal challenges before the US Supreme Court in 2016, before a lower court ruled that rejected a copyright infringement claim.
The author’s lawsuit against Meta has abdicated CEO Mark Zuckerberg and revealed internal conversations at the company about the ethics of using a long-standing pirate database.
“The authorities regularly close domains and even prosecute perpetrators,” the author’s lawyer argued in court filings. “We knew that getting copyrighted works from a pirated database could put the company at enormous risk was beyond conflict. It caused escalation to mark Zuckerberg and other meta-executives for approval. Their gambling should not be rewarded.”
“Whatever the benefits of generative artificial intelligence, or genai, I’ve always been illegal by stealing copyrighted works from the internet,” they allegedly argued.
The appointed plaintiffs are Jacqueline Woodson, Richard Cudley, Andrew Sean Greer, Rachel Louise Snyder, David Henry Hunn, Tanehisi Coates, Laura Lipman, Matthew Crumb, Junot Diaz, Sara Silverman, Lysa Terkelest, Christopher Golden and Christopher Ferntwo.
Most of the plaintiffs asked Chhabria to take control of the basic claims of whether Meta was copyright infringed, rather than awaiting a trial. Two of the plaintiffs, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Christopher Golden, did not seek such summary judgment.
In his ruling, Chhabri said “there is no option,” but he sued Meta’s summary judgment, saying, “In the grand scheme of things, the outcome of this judgment is limited. This is not a class action lawsuit. Therefore, this judgment does not only affect the rights of these 13 authors.
Original issue: June 25th, 2025, 6:57pm EDT
