Publishers Sue Meta Over AI Training

Five major publishers, Elsevier, Cengage Group, Lagardère — Hachette Livre, Macmillan Publishers, and McGraw Hill Education, along with author Scott Turow, have filed a class-action lawsuit against Meta Platforms and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The lawsuit, filed in Manhattan federal court, alleges that Meta Platforms illegally copied millions of copyrighted books and journal articles to train its Llama artificial intelligence models. The plaintiffs claim that Mark Zuckerberg personally authorized and actively encouraged this infringement, which included obtaining materials through illegal torrenting and unauthorized web scraping. They further allege that Meta Platforms stripped copyright management information from the stolen works and abruptly halted its licensing strategy for AI training materials in early 2023. The publishers are seeking unspecified monetary damages and permission to represent a larger class of copyright owners. Meta Platforms has stated it will fight the lawsuit aggressively, arguing that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use. This case adds to a growing number of lawsuits against AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic over the use of copyrighted content for AI training, with Anthropic having previously settled a similar case for $1.5 billion.