Five major publishers, together with author Scott Turow, filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, accusing the tech giant of copyright infringement. The publishers—Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan and McGraw Hill—allege that Meta used millions of their works without permission to train its Llama large language models.
According to the proposed class-action complaint, Meta pirated a wide range of materials, including textbooks, scientific articles and novels such as The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin and The Wild Robot by Peter Brown. The plaintiffs are seeking to represent a larger class of copyright owners and claim an unspecified amount in monetary damages.
“Meta’s mass-scale infringement isn’t public progress, and AI will never be properly realised if tech companies prioritise pirate sites over scholarship and imagination,” said Maria Pallante, president of the Association of American Publishers, in a statement. A Meta spokesperson responded: “AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use. We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”
The case opens a new front in the ongoing legal battle between creators and tech firms over AI training. Similar lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI, Anthropic and others. The first two judges to consider the issue issued diverging rulings last year. Anthropic settled a class-action lawsuit last year for $1.5bn, while The New York Times has also sued OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright infringement.
