That’s a huge legal battle that’s brewing as multiple authors have sued Meta Platforms, Inc. for allegedly infringing their intellectual property rights. Suit filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division. The lawsuit zeroes in on claims that Meta unlawfully used Richard Kadrey’s ebooks to train its AI models.
Richard Kadrey, joined by fellow authors Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, claims that Meta’s AI company illegally reproduced their work. They claim that Meta removed copyright management data from Kadrey’s ebooks to conceal this infringement. The authors contend that such actions are not only an infringement of their rights as creators but erode the fundamental integrity of copyright law itself.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria ruled in April that the case should be allowed to proceed. Though he rejected all of it, he emphasized that these big issues must be tackled urgently. This case forms part of a broader trend where authors are voicing concerns over AI technologies and their implications for creative industries.
In an important step, a coalition of copyright law scholars filed an amicus brief. On Friday, these two filed a joint amicus brief to defend the authors. The brief argues against Meta’s defense of fair use, labeling it “a breathtaking request for greater legal privileges than courts have ever granted human authors.” As this response demonstrates, this has become a flashpoint of increasing hostility with the old copyright paradigm as it wars with new realities of AI.
The amicus brief claims that using copyrighted works to train generative models is not “transformative.” It states, “using works for that purpose is not relevantly different from using them to educate human authors, which is a principal original purpose of all of [authors’] works.”
Moreover, the brief argues that Meta’s training use is not merely non-transformative, but rather, commercial in nature. “That training use is also not ‘transformative’ because its purpose is to enable the creation of works that compete with the copied works in the same markets – a purpose that, when pursued by a for-profit company like Meta, also makes the use undeniably ‘commercial,’” it reads.
This case is only one of the more than 100 AI copyright lawsuits that the courts are still trying to process. Among them is a closely watched case between The New York Times and OpenAI. These arguments are happening today. Rather, they are almost sure to set precedent for the lasting impact of copyright law on artificial intelligence and its many applications.
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