Californian courts have not been kind to authors this week, with a second ruling going against an unlucky 13 who sought redress for use of their content in training AI models.
On Monday, Anthropic won most of its case against three authors over its use of their works to train its AI. Judge William Alsup ruled Anthropic was able to use the authors’ books if it bought them, but not if it pirated their material.
This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful
Meta received a similar verdict two days later in a decision [PDF] issued by Judge Vince Chhabria of California Northern District Court.
Citing Judge Alsup’s earlier ruling, Chhabria said Meta’s copying of the authors’ works was technically fair use, since the AI wouldn’t reproduce large parts of their text, and that the authors should have tried a different legal argument.
The authors alleged that Meta fed 666 copies of books to which they hold copyright into its Llama models but did so without attempting to license the works. The writers argued that Meta’s AI could reproduce parts of their works and this would cause them financial harm.
The Judge could find no evidence of that harm.
“They contend that Llama is capable of reproducing small snippets of text from their books. And they contend that Meta, by using their works for training without permission, has diminished the authors’ ability to license their works for the purpose of training large language models. As explained below, both of these arguments are clear losers,” he wrote.
“The Court has no choice but to grant summary judgment to Meta on the plaintiffs’ claim that the company violated copyright law by training its models with their books. But in the grand scheme of things, the consequences of this ruling are limited,” he wrote.
“This is not a class action, so the ruling only affects the rights of these thirteen authors – not the countless others whose works Meta used to train its models. And, as should now be clear, this ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful. It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.”
However, the Judge also dismissed Meta’s arguments that requiring the social media giant to stop slurping copyrighted material to train LLMs is not in the public interest, describing that argument as “nonsense.”
Courts are considering several similar cases. Microsoft is currently embroiled in a lawsuit brought by authors over the claimed pirating of their work to train an AI engine, while Disney and Universal are suing AI outfit Midjourney for alleged copyright infringement over image generation.®
