Judge in Meta case weighs key question for AI copyright lawsuits

By Blake Brittain

May 1 (Reuters) - A federal judge in San Francisco will hear arguments on Thursday from Meta Platforms META.O and a group of authors in the first court hearing over a pivotal question in high-stakes copyright cases over AI training.

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria will consider Meta's request for a pretrial ruling that it made "fair use" of books from writers including Junot Diaz and comedian Sarah Silverman to train its Llama large language model.

The fair use question hangs over lawsuits brought by authors, news outlets and other copyright owners against companies including Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic. The legal doctrine allows for the use of copyrighted work without the copyright owner's permission under some circumstances.

The authors in the Meta case sued in 2023, arguing the company used pirated versions of their books to train Llama without permission or compensation.

Technology companies have said that being forced to pay copyright holders for their content could hamstring the burgeoning, multi-billion dollar AI industry. The defendants say their AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by studying it to learn to create new, transformative content.

Plaintiffs in the cases counter that AI companies unlawfully copy their work to generate competing content that threatens their livelihoods.

Meta told Chhabria in March that it used the authors' material transformatively, to teach Llama to "serve as a personal tutor on nearly any subject, assist with creative ideation, and help users to generate business reports, translate conversations, analyze data, write code, and compose poems or letters to friends."

"What it does not do is replicate Plaintiffs' books or substitute for reading them," Meta said.

The authors told Chhabria in a court filing that Meta used their books "for their expressive content — the very subject matter copyright law protects."

"Under a straightforward application of existing copyright law, Meta is liable for massive copyright infringement," the authors said.