Meta won a big AI copyright case, but the legal fight continues ...
On Wednesday, the judge in the landmark AI copyright case Kadrey, et al. v. Meta Platforms Inc. ruled in Meta’s favor. And U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria seemed to do so reluctantly, calling his own ruling “in significant tension with reality.”
The Case Details
Thirteen authors, including Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Junot Diaz, sued Meta for its unlicensed use of their books to train its Llama AI models. The facts of the case seemed particularly egregious. Not only did Meta pirate unlicensed copies of the authors’ works, but internal Meta messages revealed during discovery showed that the company's own employees expressed legal and ethical doubts about pirating those works.
Legal Complexities
Instead of settling the messy copyright battle over AI training, Chhabria's ruling adds another layer of complexity to this legal issue. Just a day earlier, a judge in a similar AI copyright case ruled in favor of another AI company, Anthropic. In the same Northern District of California, U.S. District Judge William Alsup declared in Bartz v. Anthropic that Anthropic's use of pirated books in shadow libraries Books3 and LibGen (the same datasets in the Meta case) was fair use.
Legal Perspectives
Robert Brauneis, an intellectual property law professor at George Washington University Law School, highlighted the differences in reasoning between Judge Alsup and Judge Chhabria regarding fair use. Both cases focused on the fair use legal doctrine, particularly the fourth factor in such defenses — potential market harms.
Fair Use Analysis
While both judges sided with the fair use argument, their opposing rationales lay the groundwork for a complex and fragmented legal landscape. The plaintiffs were unsuccessful in arguing against Meta’s fair use defense, leading to Chhabria's decision in Meta's favor.
Impact on the Industry
Chhabria's ruling has significant implications for the future of AI development and copyright law. It leaves the door open for other artists to file similar copyright suits against not only Meta but also other AI companies. The ruling may influence the legality of copying copyright-protected works to train generative AI models without permission in the future.
Artists' Concerns
Many in the creative industry see the rise of generative AI as a threat to their livelihoods. The potential impact of AI tools like Llama on creative professionals is a point of contention, with concerns about job displacement and the replacement of human creativity with AI-generated content.
As the legal battles in the AI copyright landscape continue, the outcomes of these cases will shape the future of AI development and its relationship with existing intellectual property laws.
