Judge Sides with Meta in Key AI Copyright Case

Twice this week! A federal judge sides with Meta in a key AI copyright case the same week Anthropic got a similar ruling in their case!

According to Law.com (Judge Sides With Meta in Key AI Copyright Case, But Says Better Lawyering Might Carry Future Plaintiffs to Victory, available here), A federal judge handed Meta a major win Tuesday in a closely watched copyright case over its use of books to train large language models, but the ruling stopped well short of giving tech companies blanket protection to scrape creative works for artificial intelligence.

In a 40-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria of the Northern District of California granted Meta’s motion for partial summary judgment, finding that the social media giant’s use of copyrighted books by 13 prominent authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman and award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates, to train its Llama AI models qualifies as fair use under current law.

“This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,” Chhabria wrote. “It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.”

The article states: “The decision marks one of the most significant AI copyright rulings to date”, which apparently means at least in the last 48 hours! 😉

The case was filed by a group of authors who alleged Meta violated their copyrights by ingesting their books, acquired through “shadow libraries” like LibGen and Anna’s Archive, into its Llama large language model without permission or payment.

Chhabria did not dispute that Meta reproduced the books. Instead, he found the company’s use was “highly transformative” and supported fair use because it trained a tool that performs new functions, such as drafting emails or summarizing documents, rather than serving as a substitute for reading the original works.

While Meta’s use was clearly commercial, with Meta projecting as much as $1.4 trillion in AI-related revenue over the next decade, Chhabria concluded that the transformative nature of the LLM training weighed more heavily under the first fair use factor.

“Copying the books to develop a tool that can perform those functions is a use with a different purpose and character than the books themselves,” he wrote.

Chhabria was most critical of the plaintiffs’ approach to the fourth and most important fair use factor: market harm.

“Meta has defeated the plaintiffs’ half-hearted argument that its copying causes or threatens significant market harm. That conclusion may be in significant tension with reality, but it’s dictated by the choice the plaintiffs made to put forward two flawed theories of market harm while failing to present meaningful evidence on the effect of training LLMs like Llama with their books on the market for those books,” Chhabria wrote.

What theory could have prevailed? The one theory Chhabria acknowledged could have prevailed—that Meta’s AI models might produce competing works in the same genre, thus substituting for the originals—was barely addressed by the plaintiffs.

“They present no evidence about how the current or expected outputs from Meta’s models would dilute the market for their own works,” the judge wrote. “The consequences of this ruling are limited.”

That may be the potential silver lining in the ruling, but we’ll see. After two rulings in one week siding with AI companies on copyright issues, dare I say it (again)? “That escalated quickly!” 😁

So, what do you think? Do you think the fact that the judge sides with Meta in this case will impact other AI copyright cases? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Hat tip to Judge Andrew Peck for the heads up on this article!

Image created using Microsoft Designer, using the term “two robot lawyers high fiving while another looks on sadly”. I don’t even have to change the image! 🤣

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the authors and speakers themselves, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.