Law professors side with authors battling Meta in AI copyright case

A group of professors specializing in copyright law has filed an amicus brief in support of authors suing Meta for allegedly training its Llama AI models on e-books without permission.

The brief, filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, calls Meta’s fair use defense “a breathtaking request for greater legal privileges than courts have ever granted human authors.”

“The use of copyrighted works to train generative models is not ‘transformative,’ because using works for that purpose is not relevantly different from using them to educate human authors, which is a principal original purpose of all of [authors’] works,” reads the brief. “That training use is also not ‘transformative’ because its purpose is to enable the creation of works that compete with the copied works in the same markets – a purpose that, when pursued by a for-profit company like Meta, also makes the use undeniably ‘commercial.’”

The International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers, the global trade association for academic and professional publishers, also submitted an amicus brief in support of the authors on Friday.

Hours after this piece was published, a Meta spokesperson pointed TechCrunch to amicus briefs filed by a smaller group of law professors and the Electronic Frontier Foundation last week supporting the tech giant’s legal position.

In the case, Kadrey v. Meta, authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates have alleged that Meta violated their intellectual property rights by using their e-books to train models, and that the company removed the copyright information from those e-books to hide the alleged infringement. Meta, meanwhile, has claimed not only that its training qualifies as fair use, but that the case should be dismissed because the authors lack standing to sue.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria allowed the case to move forward, although he dismissed part of it. In his ruling, Chhabria wrote that the allegation of copyright infringement is “obviously a concrete injury sufficient for standing” and that the authors have also “adequately alleged that Meta intentionally removed CMI [copyright management information] to conceal copyright infringement.”

The courts are weighing a number of AI copyright lawsuits at the moment, including The New York Times’ suit against OpenAI.

Updated 3:36 p.m. Pacific: Added references to the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers‘ amicus brief as well as amicus briefs filed in support of Meta’s position last week.