In a landmark ruling that may shape the future of artificial intelligence and copyright law, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by 13 prominent authors — including comedian Sarah Silverman and acclaimed writers Ta-Nehisi Coates and Junot Diaz — who accused Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, of using their copyrighted works without permission to train its AI model, Llama.
The ruling, delivered Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, marks the second such dismissal in just one week from San Francisco’s federal court, following a similar judgment in favor of AI company Anthropic. However, Judge Chhabria made it clear that his decision did not equate to a blanket legal approval of Meta’s practices.
This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,Chhabria emphasized. 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.
Authors’ Lawsuit Falls Short
The authors accused Meta of massive copyright infringement, arguing that the company scraped their works from online shadow libraries — digital repositories that often contain pirated content — and used them to train Llama. Their lawyers maintained that Meta should have paid to license or purchase the works, as Google did with its decade-long effort to digitize millions of books for Google Books.
Despite acknowledging these concerns, Judge Chhabria sided with Meta, stating that the plaintiffs failed to present sufficient legal grounds or evidence. Meta’s legal team argued that there was no proof Llama could replicate or output the plaintiffs’ original books, nor any evidence that consumers had used Llama as a substitute for reading the actual works.
No one can use Llama to read Sarah Silverman’s description of her childhood, or Junot Diaz’s story of a Dominican boy growing up in New Jersey, Meta’s lawyers wrote.
A Pyrrhic Victory for Meta?
Although Meta celebrated the ruling as a win for innovation, the judgment may carry hidden costs. Judge Chhabria’s 40-page opinion frequently cast doubt on the legality of Meta’s methods, strongly suggesting that better-argued lawsuits could succeed.
He even questioned Meta’s reliance on fair use — a provision in U.S. copyright law that allows the transformation of copyrighted content under specific circumstances — warning that commercial AI models generating billions in revenue cannot simply disregard authors’ rights.
If using copyrighted works to train the models is as necessary as the companies say, they will figure out a way to compensate copyright holders for it, he stated.
Chhabria dismissed the idea that applying existing copyright law to AI development would stifle innovation, calling that argument weak in the face of the tech industry’s massive profits and influence.
Legal Precedent Still Unclear
Earlier this week, Judge William Alsup ruled on a similar case involving Anthropic, stating that the company’s AI model Claude did not violate copyright law through training. However, he ordered that the case continue because the company may have obtained the books illegally from pirate websites rather than buying them.
Alsup’s decision underscored the growing tension between transformative use — a key defense for AI companies — and the ethical sourcing of copyrighted material. He described AI’s training process as “quintessentially transformative,” which supports the fair use argument, but noted that how the data is acquired still matters in court.
Authors Left Disappointed, But Undeterred
In response to Chhabria’s ruling, the plaintiffs’ attorneys issued a sharp statement:
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 Meta’s historic piracy, the court ruled in their favor. We respectfully disagree.
They further highlighted that internal communications at Meta — exposed during discovery — showed the company understood the risks of using pirated content. Top-level executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, were involved in approving the strategy, the plaintiffs’ attorneys claimed.
That Meta knew taking copyrighted works from pirated databases could expose the company to enormous risk is beyond dispute,the legal team wrote. Their gamble should not pay off.
Future Legal Battles Loom
While Meta prevailed this time, the judgment is not a precedent-setting blow for other authors or future plaintiffs. Judge Chhabria reiterated that the decision applies only to the 13 authors in this particular lawsuit and not to the broader pool of writers whose work may have been used in similar ways.
In the grand scheme of things, the consequences of this ruling are limited, he concluded.
The tech and publishing industries are now watching closely to see if other authors, better prepared and strategically armed, will take the judge up on what seems to be an open invitation to bring the issue back to court — and possibly succeed where this group did not.
