A federal judge has ruled in favour of Meta Platforms, dismissing a copyright infringement lawsuit from a group of authors.
The authors claimed that Meta had used their works without permission to train its artificial intelligence technology.
According to the US District Judge Vince Chhabria, the authors “made the wrong arguments”.
Chhabria also said that “in the grand scheme of things, the consequences of this ruling are limited. This is not a class action, so the ruling only affects the rights of these 13 authors—not the countless others whose works Meta used to train its models”.
The plaintiffs include comedian Sarah Silverman and authors Jacqueline Woodson and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Their lawyer, as reported by AP, said the “court ruled that AI companies that ‘feed copyright-protected works into their models without getting permission from the copyright holders or paying for them’ are generally violating the law.
“Yet, despite the undisputed record of Meta’s historically unprecedented pirating of copyrighted works, the court ruled in Meta’s favour. We respectfully disagree with that conclusion.”
Meta has expressed its appreciation for the court’s decision.
“Open-source AI models are powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and fair use of copyright material is a vital legal framework for building this transformative technology,” Meta was quoted by the publication as saying.
The ruling follows another decision from US District Judge William Alsup, who found that AI company Anthropic did not break the law by training its chatbot on millions of copyrighted books.
However, Anthropic must still face trial for acquiring those books from pirate websites.
Judge Alsup’s ruling highlighted that the AI system’s process of distilling from thousands of works to produce its own text was “quintessentially transformative” and qualified as “fair use” under US copyright law.
The developments come as Meta’s investment in Scale AI has boosted the data-labelling startup’s valuation beyond $29bn.
As part of this deal, Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang will lead Meta’s AI efforts while continuing to serve on Scale AI’s board.
