A federal judge has allowed a portion of an AI copyright lawsuit against Meta to proceed, rejecting the tech giant’s attempt to have the case dismissed entirely.
In July 2023, comedienne and The Bedwetter author Sarah Silverman, Sandman Slim author Richard Kadrey and Ararat author Christopher Golden filed a class-action lawsuit against Meta and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, allegedly the tech companies violated copyright laws by training their models on copyrighted books.
Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, launched an AI large language model (LLM) called LLaMA in February 2023. Silverman and the two other authors alleged that “their copyrighted materials were copied and ingested as part of training LLaMA.”
“Many of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted books appear in the dataset that Meta has admitted to using to train LLaMA,” according to the 2023 court filing, which can be read in full here.
In a ruling filed on Friday (March 7), US District Judge Vince Chhabria granted in part and denied in part Meta’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The judge ruled that the authors’ claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) over alleged removal of copyright management information (CMI) can go forward.
“The plaintiffs have adequately alleged that Meta intentionally removed [copyright management information] to conceal copyright infringement,” Judge Chhabria wrote.
“The plaintiffs allege that Meta ‘knew that Llama was especially ‘prone’ to memorizing and generating outputs of CMI unless CMI was removed from’ its training data. They also allege that Meta took a number of other steps to reduce the likelihood that Llama would generate outputs that would reveal or indicate that copyrighted material was included in training datasets.”
“The plaintiffs have adequately alleged that Meta intentionally removed CMI to conceal copyright infringement.”
US District Judge Vince Chhabria
The judge added that the authors’ allegations raise a “reasonable, if not particularly strong, inference” that Meta’s removal of CMI was an attempt to hide Llama’s potential copyright infringement.
However, Judge Chhabria dismissed the authors’ claim under the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA), finding it’s preempted by federal copyright law.
The judge noted that the authors did not allege that Meta accessed their computers or servers, “only their data (in the form of their books).”
“And the only reason that the books Meta acquired could plausibly be considered the plaintiffs’ data is because the plaintiffs own the copyrights on those books,” he wrote.
Further, Judge Chhabria rejected Meta’s argument that the authors lacked standing because the DMCA protects different interests than traditional copyright law. He ruled that “whether the DMCA seeks to prevent the exact injuries the plaintiffs allege is a separate question from whether the plaintiffs have been concretely injured by Meta’s CMI removal.”
Aside from Meta, the authors also sued OpenAI in 2023, with lawyers for Silverman arguing that “much of the material in OpenAI’s training datasets… comes from copyrighted works – including books written by plaintiffs – that were copied by OpenAI without consent, without credit, and without compensation.”
The lawsuit against OpenAI argues that, because ChatGPT integrated the copyrighted works into its algorithm, it may itself be a “derivative work” covered by copyright.
“Because the OpenAI Language Models cannot function without the expressive information extracted from plaintiffs’ works (and others) and retained inside them, the OpenAI Language Models are themselves infringing derivative works, made without plaintiffs’ permission and in violation of their exclusive rights under the Copyright Act,” the complaint states.
In response to the complaint, lawyers for OpenAI argued that the fact that ChatGPT was able to offer accurate summaries of the authors’ copyrighted books doesn’t amount to copyright infringement.
The case represents one of several high-profile legal challenges to AI companies over the use of copyrighted materials in training LLMs. Also in 2023, the Authors Guild, which represents 9,000 professional writers in the US, was joined by 17 of its members, including Game of Thrones writer George R.R. Martin and John Grisham, in a lawsuit against OpenAI. The suit alleges that OpenAI “copied plaintiffs’ works wholesale, without permission or consideration,” then fed these texts into its LLMs.
Major music companies have also lodged legal challenges against AI companies. In June 2024, AI music generation platform Suno was sued by the major record companies, along with fellow AI music firm Udio, for allegedly training their systems using the majors’ recordings without permission – an accusation they pretty much admitted to in court filings in August.
Suno was also sued for copyright infringement by GEMA, the German collection society and licensing body, in January.
Prior to the Suno and Udio cases, Universal Music Group and other music publishers sued AI company Anthropic in 2023, claiming that it trained its AI system Claude on lyrics from at least 500 songs by major artists, including Katy Perry, the Rolling Stones, and Beyoncé, and sought $150,000 in damages per infringement.
In January, the group led by UMG secured court-approved restrictions requiring Anthropic to implement safeguards in its AI models to prevent copyright violations.
Music Business Worldwide
