Copyright Battle: Major Publishers Sue Meta Over Alleged AI Training Piracy

Major academic and trade publishers have filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms in a Manhattan federal court, alleging that the technology giant infringed copyright by using their books and journal articles to train its artificial intelligence model, Llama.

Publishers including Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan and McGraw Hill, along with author Scott Turow, claimed in a proposed class action that Meta unlawfully copied millions of works without permission to train its large language models to respond to human prompts.

Responding to the allegations, 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. We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”

The publishers allege that Meta used a wide range of materials — from textbooks and scientific articles to novels such as The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin and The Wild Robot by Peter Brown — without authorisation. They are seeking permission to represent a broader class of copyright holders, along with unspecified damages.

“Meta’s mass-scale infringement is not public progress, and AI will never be properly realised if tech companies prioritise pirate sites over scholarship and imagination,” said Maria Pallante, president of the Association of American Publishers.

The case marks a new front in the escalating legal battle between content creators and technology firms over AI training practices. Dozens of authors, news organisations and visual artists have already brought similar claims against companies including Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic.

At the heart of these disputes lies the question of whether using copyrighted material to train AI systems constitutes fair use by creating new, transformative outputs. Early judicial decisions have offered conflicting interpretations, signalling a complex legal road ahead.

Anthropic, backed by Amazon and Google, became the first major AI company to settle one such case last year, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion to a group of authors to resolve a class-action lawsuit over alleged piracy.

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