The publishing houses Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan and McGraw Hill sued the Meta platforms in a federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday, accusing the technology giant of using their books and scientific articles without permission to train its Llama artificial intelligence model, reports Reuters, taken by Agerpres.
The publishers, along with writer Scott Turow, claimed in a class-action complaint that Meta pirated millions of their works and used them without consent to train its large language models to answer people's questions.
“AI drives innovation, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have correctly found that training AI with copyrighted material can be considered fair use,” a Meta spokesperson responded in a statement on Tuesday.
The publishers claim that Meta pirated works ranging from textbooks to science articles and novels including “The Fifth Season” by NK Jemisin and “The Wild Robot” by Peter Brown for the purpose of training the AI. They asked the court for permission to represent a larger group of copyright holders and an unspecified amount in monetary damages.
“Meta's widespread rule-breaking is not public progress, and AI will never be implemented properly if tech companies prioritize hacked sites over scholarship and imagination,” Maria Pallante, president of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement.
The lawsuit opens a new front in the ongoing copyright dispute between creators and tech companies over AI training, which has led dozens of writers, media companies, visual artists and other plaintiffs to sue companies like Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic for copyright infringement. All pending cases will have to determine whether AI systems have properly used copyrighted material to create new and transformative content.
The first two judges who dealt with this issue gave conflicting sentences last year. Anthropic was the first major AI company to settle in one of the cases, agreeing last year to pay a group of writers $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit that otherwise would have cost the company billions of dollars more in damages for alleged piracy.
