A federal judge dismissed a copyright-infringement lawsuit against Facebook-parent company Meta from a group of authors who accused the company of stealing their works to train its artificial intelligence technology.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabri said that the 13 authors who sued Meta “made the wrong arguments,” and that they hadn’t presented enough evidence that the technology company’s AI would dilute the market for their work to show that its conduct was illegal under U.S. copyright law. However, he also said that the ruling is limited to the authors in the case and does not mean that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials is lawful. The group of writers include well-known names like comedian Sarah Silverman and authors Jacqueline Woodson and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
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A spokesperson for the Meta case authors’ law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, said that it disagreed with the judge’s decision to rule for Meta despite the “undisputed record” of the company’s “historically unprecedented pirating of copyrighted works.” A Meta spokesperson on the other hand said the company appreciated the decision and called fair use a “vital legal framework” for building “transformative” AI technology.
This judgement comes shortly after a similar ruling in support of Anthropic. U.S. District Judge William Alsup had said Anthropic made “fair use” of books by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson to train its Claude large language model. However, Anthropic must still face trial for acquiring those books from pirate websites.
Anthropic told the court that it made fair use of the books and that U.S. copyright law “not only allows, but encourages” its AI training because it promotes human creativity. The company said its system copied the books to “study Plaintiffs’ writing, extract uncopyrightable information from it, and use what it learned to create revolutionary technology.”
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Chhabri stated his stance was different from that of Alsup, since in copyright law, courts determine fair use in part by looking at whether the work that’s created based on copyrighted material is “transformative,” meaning it’s not a substitute for the original but rather something new. They also assess whether the new work causes “market harm,” or hurts the original rights holder financially. “It’s notable that he disagreed, sharply but respectfully, with Judge Alsup on the market dilution theory,” says James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and internet law at Cornell University.
The use of copyrighted material for artificial intelligence training has been a hot button issue of late. Many see this as a theft of intellectual property, and an unfair threat to creative professionals around the world.