A group of prominent copyright law professors has submitted an amicus brief supporting authors involved in an ongoing lawsuit against Meta Platforms. The authors accuse Meta of unlawfully using copyrighted ebooks to train its Llama generative AI models without obtaining the rights or consent.
Filed recently in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California’s San Francisco division, the brief rejects Meta’s fair use argument as unprecedented and asserts that the company’s behavior far exceeds any legal protections historically granted to human authors. The professors argue that Meta’s actions cannot be considered “transformative,” a key element in fair use evaluations, because using copyrighted materials to train generative AI models is essentially no different from using those same works to educate writers—an original intended purpose of the creative work itself.
The brief further notes that Meta’s purposes are indisputably commercial, specifically because their AI-generated content competes directly with the original authors’ works in the market. This economic motive further weakens the argument for fair use protection, according to the brief.
The lawsuit, known as Kadrey v. Meta, counts among its plaintiffs writers such as Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The authors have alleged that Meta consciously removed copyright management information from ebooks in an attempt to conceal the infringement. Meta, on the other hand, maintains that their usage constitutes fair use and has argued that the authors lack legal standing to sue.
Earlier this month, District Judge Vince Chhabria permitted substantial parts of the lawsuit to move forward. In his ruling, Judge Chhabria stated that the plaintiffs had clearly demonstrated sufficient injury to sustain their claims. He also found credible their allegations concerning Meta’s intentional deletion of copyright management details.
This particular suit is one among several ongoing legal battles concerning artificial intelligence and copyright infringement, including prominent lawsuits involving other technology companies, media organizations, and generative AI firms.
