Mark Zuckerberg ‘personally authorized’ Meta AI copyright infringement, major publishers allege in new lawsuit

Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg are facing a class action lawsuit from five publishing houses and author Scott Turow, who allege the tech giant illegally used millions of copyrighted works to train its artificial intelligence system, Llama.

Filed in a federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday, the legal action accuses Meta of widespread copyright infringement, marking a significant escalation in the ongoing dispute between the literary world and AI developers.

The plaintiffs contend that Mr Zuckerberg and Meta "followed their well-known motto ‘move fast and break things’" by illicitly drawing upon a vast collection of books and journal articles for Llama’s development.

“Defendants reproduced and distributed millions of copyrighted works without permission, without providing any compensation to authors or publishers, and with full knowledge that their conduct violated copyright law,” the complaint reads in part.

“Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement."

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Authors published by the five companies suing — Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan and McGraw Hill — include Turow, James Patterson, Donna Tartt, former President Joe Biden and at least two of the Pulitzer Prize winners announced Monday, Yiyun Li and Amanda Vaill.

In a statement Monday, Meta vowed to “fight this lawsuit aggressively.”

“AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use," the statement reads in part.

The lawsuit opens a new front in the ongoing copyright battle between creators and tech companies over AI training, in which dozens of authors, news outlets, visual artists and other plaintiffs have sued companies including Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic for infringement.

All of the pending cases will likely ‌revolve around whether AI systems make fair use of copyrighted ​material by using it to create new, transformative content.

The ‌first two judges to consider the matter ⁠issued diverging rulings last year.

Amazon- and Google-backed Anthropic was ⁠the first major AI company to settle one of the cases, agreeing last year to ‌pay a group of authors $1.5 ​billion to resolve a class-action ‌lawsuit that could have cost the company ​billions more in damages for alleged piracy.