A group of professors specializing in copyright law has filed an amicus brief in support of authors suing Meta for allegedly training its Llama AI models on ebooks without permission.
The brief, filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, calls Meta’s fair use defense “a breathtaking request for greater legal privileges than courts have ever granted human authors.”
“The use of copyrighted works to train generative models is not ‘transformative,’ because using works for that purpose is not relevantly different from using them to educate human authors, which is a principal original purpose of all of [the authors’] works,” reads the brief. “That training use is also not ‘transformative’ because its purpose is to enable the creation of works that compete with the copied works in the same markets – a purpose that, when pursued by a for-profit company like Meta, also makes the use undeniably ‘commercial.’”
In the case, Kadrey v. Meta, authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates have alleged that Meta violated their intellectual property rights by using their ebooks to train models, and that the company removed the copyright information from those ebooks to hide the alleged infringement. Meta, meanwhile, has claimed not only that its training qualifies as fair use, but that the case should be dismissed because the authors lack standing to sue.
Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria allowed the case to move forward, although he dismissed part of it. In his ruling, Chhabria wrote that the allegation of copyright infringement is “obviously a concrete injury sufficient for standing” and that the authors have also “adequately alleged that Meta intentionally removed CMI [copyright management information] to conceal copyright infringement.”
The courts are weighing a number of AI copyright lawsuits at the moment, including The New York Times’ suit against OpenAI.
