Meta Won Its AI Fair Use Lawsuit, but Judge Says Authors Are Likely 'to Often Win' Going Forward

CNET

2 days ago

AI companies scored another victory in court this week. Meta on Wednesday won a motion for partial summary judgment in its favor in Kadrey v. Meta, a case brought on by 13 authors alleging the company infringed on their copyright protections by illegally using their books to train its Llama AI models. The ruling comes two days after a similar victory for Claude maker Anthropic.
But Judge Vince Chhabria stressed in his order that this ruling should be limited and doesn't absolve Meta of future claims from other authors.
"This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful," he wrote. "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."
The issue at the heart of the cases is whether the AI companies' use of protected content for AI training qualifies as fair use. The fair use doctrine is a fundamental part of US copyright law that allows people to use copyrighted work without the rights holders' explicit permission, like in education and journalism. There are four key considerations when evaluating whether something is fair use. Anthropic's ruling focused on transformativeness, while Meta's focused on the effect the use of AI has on the existing publishing market.
These rulings are big wins for AI companies. OpenAI, Google and others have been fighting for fair use so they don't have to enter costly and lengthy licensing agreements with content creators, much to the chagrin of content creators. A group of famous authors signed an open letter on Friday, urging publishers to take a stronger stance against AI and avoid using it.
"The purveyors of AI have stolen our work from us and from our publishers, too," the letter reads. The authors call out how AI is trained on their work, without permission and compensation, and yet the programs will never be able to connect with humans like real humans can. For the authors bringing these lawsuits, they may see some victories in subsequent piracy trials (for Anthropic) or new lawsuits. But concerns abound about the overall effect AI will have on writers now and in the future, which is something Chhabria also recognized in his order.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
In his analysis, Chhabria focused on the effect AI-generated books have on the existing publishing market, which he saw as the most important factor of the four needed to prove fair use. He wrote extensively about the risk that generative AI and large language models could potentially violate copyright law, and that fair use needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Some works, like autobiographies and classic literature such as The Catcher in the Rye, likely couldn't be created with AI, he wrote. However, he noted that "the market for the typical human-created romance or spy novel could be diminished substantially by the proliferation of similar AI-created works."
In other words, AI slop could make human-written books seem less valuable and undercut authors' willingness and ability to create.
Still, Chhabria said that the plaintiffs did not show sufficient evidence to prove harm from how "Meta's models would dilute the market for their own works." The plaintiffs focused their arguments on how Meta's AI models can reproduce exact snippets from their works and how the company's Llama models hurt their ability to license their books to AI companies. These arguments weren't as compelling in Chhabria's eyes -- he called them "clear losers" -- so he sided with Meta.
That's different from the Anthropic ruling, where Judge William Alsup focused on the "exceedingly transformative" nature of the use of the plaintiff's books in the results AI chatbots spit out. Chhabria wrote that while "there is no disputing" that the use of copyrighted material was transformative, the more urgent question was the effect AI systems had on the ecosystem as a whole.
Alsup also outlined concerns about Anthropic's methods of obtaining the books, through illegal online libraries and then by deliberating purchasing print copies to digitize for a "research library."
Two court rulings do not make every AI company's use of content legal under fair use. What makes these cases notable is that they are the first to issue substantive legal analyses on the issue; AI companies and publishers have been duking it out in court for years now.
But just as Chhabria referenced and responded to the Anthropic ruling, all judges use past cases with similar situations as reference points. They don't have to come to the same conclusion, but the role of precedent is important. It's likely that we'll see these two rulings referenced in other AI and copyright/piracy cases.
But we'll have to wait and see how big of an effect these rulings will play in future cases -- and whether it's the warnings or greenlights that hold the most weight in future decisions.
For more, check out our guide to copyright and AI.