Meta has handed down a major legal ruling in an AI copyright lawsuit filed by 13 authors, alleging that the company illegally trained its AI systems without permission. On Wednesday, Judge Vince Chhabria ruled in favor of Meta, saying that she is “right to a summary judgment on fair use defense against allegations that copying these plaintiffs' books for use as training data for LLM is infringement.”
However, the judge also defended the actions as fair use of Big Tech's AI efforts and some weaknesses in the ecosystem of meta debate. “The ruling does not represent the proposition that Meta uses copyrighted material to train language models,” Judge Chhabria said.
“It only represents the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong argument and failed to develop a record in favor of the right thing.” The ruling follows the major fair use victory of humanity, which was won yesterday from another federal judge.
Judge Chhabria states that the author's two arguments on fair use are “clear losers.” Meta's Llama AI diluted the ability to replicate text snippets from books, and Meta's ability to use the work to escape work for training without training AI models. “The llamas are unable to generate sufficient text from the plaintiff's book, and the plaintiff is not entitled to license the work as training data for AI,” the judge wrote.
The plaintiffs did not do enough for the “potentially winning argument” that a copy of the meta would “produce “a product that is likely to flood the market with similar works and cause market dilution.” He also discussed the human ruling and said Judge William Alsup had sidelined concerns about AI that could cause harm by being “fed to the market for a trained work.”
