A federal judge ruled in favor of Meta on Wednesday, rejecting claims by thirteen authors, including Sarah Silverman, who had accused the company of illegally using their copyrighted works to train artificial intelligence models.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria issued the decision through a summary judgment, allowing him to resolve the lawsuit without a jury trial. In his ruling, Chhabria concluded that the specific instance of Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its AI models qualified as “fair use” under copyright law.
The ruling comes just days after another federal court decision favored AI startup Anthropic in a similar copyright-related lawsuit. Taken together, these decisions represent notable victories for technology companies defending the controversial practice of using copyrighted works to build and train AI models.
However, Judge Chhabria emphasized that his decision had limited implications. He clarified explicitly that this ruling does not confirm the legality of all instances of AI model training on copyrighted works. Rather, he noted that the plaintiffs in this particular case failed to adequately support key arguments critical to proving copyright infringement.
“This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials for training its language models is lawful,” Chhabria explained in his opinion. He further suggested the likelihood of future plaintiffs succeeding against similar corporate practices, provided they offer a more robust evidentiary record demonstrating detailed market harm.
Central to the judge’s ruling was that the specific usage by Meta was transformative and thus not a mere replication of the original materials. Additionally, Chhabria concluded that the authors had presented insufficient evidence to back their claims that Meta’s training practices harmed the commercial market for their works—a crucial point in evaluating claims of copyright infringement.
Both Meta’s and Anthropic’s favorable judgments exclusively addressed AI model training using books. Numerous other lawsuits remain active and unresolved, addressing similar concerns about training AI systems on copyrighted news articles, films, and television programs. Notably, The New York Times is litigating its dispute against OpenAI and Microsoft for the use of its articles, while major studios such as Disney and Universal are suing Midjourney for allegedly training models on movies and TV shows.
Judge Chhabria also suggested that various sectors might face differing outcomes in similar cases, depending on the strength of fair-use arguments and the impacts demonstrated on respective markets. News articles, he remarked, may be particularly vulnerable to competitive pressures arising from AI-generated content.
