Meta, Zuckerberg Sued Over Alleged Copyright Infringement by Book Publishers and Scott Turow

Key Points:

• Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have been sued by five publishers and author Scott Turow for allegedly illegally copying millions of copyrighted books, articles, and other works to train Meta’s AI system, Llama.
• The lawsuit claims Meta torrented copyrighted materials from pirate sites and downloaded unauthorized web scrapes, then copied these materials multiple times to develop their generative AI, accusing Zuckerberg of personally authorizing and encouraging these actions.
• The suit alleges Meta initially considered licensing works but abandoned this strategy on Zuckerberg’s instruction to rely on a fair-use defense instead, despite internal concerns about the legality of using pirated datasets like LibGen.
• Meta has previously signed licensing agreements for some training materials but is accused of massively infringing copyrights by using over 267 terabytes of pirated content, equivalent to hundreds of millions of publications.
• Meta responded by stating that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use and vowed to fight the lawsuit aggressively; past similar lawsuits against AI companies have been dismissed based on fair use rulings.