Federal Judge Allows Author’s AI Copyright Infringement Lawsuit To Move Forward

A federal judge has allowed an AI-related copyright lawsuit against Meta to move forward, although part of the suit has been dismissed. In the case of Kadrey vs. Meta, authors Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Te-Nehisi Coates, alleged that Meta violated their intellectual property rights by using their books to train its Llama AI models and that the company removed the copyright information from their books to hide the alleged infringement.

Meta will likely claim that its training qualifies under fair use. Meta argued that the case should be dismissed because the authors lack standing to sue. In court last month, a U.S. District judge seemed to indicate that he was against dismissing the case, but also criticized what he saw as over the top rhetoric from the authors’ legal teams.

In Friday’s ruling, the judge wrote that the allegation of copyright infringement is “ obviously a concrete injury sufficient for standing” and that the authors also have “ adequately alleged that Meta intentionally removed CMI (copyright management information) to conceal copyright infringement.

The judge wrote that, “Taken together, these allegations raise a ‘reasonable, if not particularly strong inference’ that Meta removed CMI to try to prevent Llama from outputting CMI and thus revealing it was trained on copyrighted material.”

On the other hand, the judge dismissed the author’s claims related to the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA), because they did not allege that Meta accessed its computers or servers— only their data in the form of their books.

The lawsuit has provided a window into how Meta approaches copyright infringement, with court filings from the plaintiffs claiming that Mark Zuckerberg gave Llama permission to train the models using copyrighted works and that other Meta team members discussed the use of legally questionable content for AI training.

AI and copyright infringement lawsuits 

This lawsuit is the latest in a barrage of copyright infringement lawsuits filed by various plaintiffs over the use of their copyrighted material to train large language models or LLMs. The authors contend that Meta illegally used their copyrighted materials to train their AIs without permission. They further allege that Meta removed copyright information from the trained materials to avoid having the copyright show up during the user search.

It remains unclear whether the defendants in these cases will be able to claim fair use of the author’s copyrighted materials. However, if they can’t, the authors may be entitled to a significant payday from AI companies who vacuumed up a considerable amount of copyrighted material to train their models.

Talk to a Dayton OH copyright infringement attorney today 

Has another company or individual illegally used your copyrighted materials? If so, call the Dayton, OH business litigation attorneys at Kohl & Cook Law Firm, LLC to set up an appointment and learn more about how we could help.

Source:

techcrunch.com/2025/03/08/judge-allows-authors-ai-copyright-lawsuit-against-meta-to-move-forward/