by Kevin Killough
A lawsuit filed by five publishers on Tuesday alleges Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg of illegally using copyrighted materials to train the tech company’s online artificial intelligence platform Llama.
McGraw Hill, Macmillan, Elsevier, Hachette and Cengage contend Meta’s software engineers used pirated books and journal articles to train the AI model. The works were downloaded through piracy sites, according to the lawsuit, and Zuckerberg personally authorized the copyright infringement.
“A.I. is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training A.I. on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use,” a spokesman for Meta told The New York Times. “We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”
The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and also alleges that Zuckerberg and Meta removed copyright notices from the works they used, The Times also reports.
“Defendants’ infringement displaces legitimate sales of publications by downloading and torrenting copies from unauthorized sources. It usurps the existing and growing AI licensing market by copying Plaintiffs’ and the Class’s works into Llama’s training set without permission or compensation,” the complaint states.
“If left unaddressed, Defendants will continue to infringe Plaintiffs’ and the Class’s rights, cause broad and lasting damage to the publishing industry and authors, and weaken the incentive to create that is at the core of the Copyright Act. These facts are not a referendum on AI technologies, but rather their greedy and irresponsible deployment,” the complaint adds.
The complaint also says the plaintiffs are bringing “this action on behalf of themselves and a proposed Class to stop Defendants’ infringement and preserve the important work of authors and publishers and the literary ecosystem more broadly.”
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Kevin Killough is a reporter for Just the News. Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of The Star News Network and contributed to this story.
