Publishers and Scott Turow Sue Meta, Zuckerberg Over AI Training on Copyrighted Works

Publishers Cengage, Elsevier, Hachette, Macmillan and McGraw-Hill joined bestselling novelist Scott Turow in suing Meta and its founder Mark Zuckerberg. The class-action lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court in New York, accuses the tech company of using copyrighted material to train its Llama artificial intelligence models.

The plaintiffs claim Meta scraped millions of copyrighted works from across the internet, including from notorious pirate sites, and fed the content into Llama without permission. The suit further alleges that Meta stripped copyright management information from the works to conceal its use of the pilfered materials.

Llama, like other chatbots, produces text in response to user prompts. According to the complaint, the AI reproduces versions of original novels, journal articles and textbooks. In some instances, it generates verbatim copies and even mimics individual authors' personal styles.

Meta's practices have deprived authors and publishers of revenue, the plaintiffs argue. The lawsuit points to Zuckerberg as the driving force, stating he personally authorized and encouraged the infringement by bypassing standard licensing procedures.

Zuckerberg's close involvement in Meta's AI efforts included approving the use of pirated collections via torrent to train Llama, the suit says. His net worth recently surpassed $200 billion as a result.

A Meta spokesperson said in an email to CBS News that the company will fight the 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 spokesperson added.

Authors and publishers have tangled with AI firms before on copyright matters. Last year, Anthropic, creator of the Claude chatbot, settled with hundreds of thousands of authors for $1.5 billion, the largest such payout in history according to The New York Times.

The plaintiffs seek damages.