Mark Zuckerberg personally authorised Meta’s AI copyright infringement, lawsuit alleges
Mark Zuckerberg is seen on a screen speaking during a hearing on Capitol Hill on 10 April, 2018 in Washington, DC (AFP via Getty Images) Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg personally approved the massive copyright infringement of books and articles to train his company’s artificial intelligence systems, according to a lawsuit. Five publishing houses and author Scott Turow took legal action against the tech giant on Tuesday amid an ongoing dispute between AI developers and the literary world. Publishers Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette , Macmillan and McGraw Hill allege that Meta pirated millions of their copyrighted works to train its large language model (LLM) Llama. "Meta’s mass-scale infringement isn’t public progress, and AI will never be properly realized if tech companies prioritize pirate sites over scholarship and imagination," Maria Pallante, president of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement. The lawsuit opens a new front in the ongoing copyright battle between creators and tech companies over AI training, in which dozens of authors, news outlets, visual artists and other plaintiffs have sued companies including Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic for infringement. All of the pending cases will likely revolve around whether AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by using it to create new, transformative content. The first two judges to consider the matter issued diverging rulings last year. Amazon- and Google-backed Anthropic was the first major AI company to settle one of the cases, agreeing last year to pay a group of authors $1.5 billion to resolve a class-action lawsuit that could have cost the company billions more in damages for alleged piracy. The publishers allege that Meta pirated works ranging from textbooks to scientific articles to novels including The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin and The Wild Robot by Peter Brown for its AI training. They asked the court for permission to represent a larger class of copyright owners and an unspecified amount of monetary damages. In a statement on Tuesday, a Meta spokesperson said: “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.” Additional reporting from agencies.
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