Scott Turow and five publishers are suing Meta, claiming the technology company used copyright-protected books to train Llama, its line of artificial-intelligence large language models, the New York Times reports.
Turow, the author of legal thrillers including Presumed Innocent and The Last Trial, is a plaintiff in the copyright infringement lawsuit alongside publishers Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier, and Cengage. Meta and its chairman and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg , are the defendants.
The lawsuit claims that engineers unlawfully used pirated books to train Llama, the large language model that Meta released in 2023. The plaintiffs assert that Meta “illegally torrented millions of copyrighted books and journal articles from notorious pirate sites and downloaded unauthorized web scrapes of virtually the entire internet. They then copied those stolen fruits many times over to train Meta’s multi-billion-dollar generative AI system called Llama. In doing so, Defendants engaged in one of the most massive infringements of copyrighted materials in history.”
Dave Arnold, a spokesperson for Meta, told the Times, “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. We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”
Last year, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to a group of authors and publishers who sued the firm for training its large language model, Claude, on pirated copies of their books. The settlement came after a judge ruled that while using the books to train the models fell under fair use, the company’s use of pirated books was unlawful.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
