Latest news with #Chhabria
Express Tribune
9 hours ago
- Business
- Express Tribune
Meta wins copyright lawsuit
A US judge on Wednesday handed Meta a victory over authors who accused the tech giant of violating copyright law by training Llama artificial intelligence on their creations without permission. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco ruled that Meta's use of the works to train its AI model was "transformative" enough to constitute "fair use" under copyright law, in the second such courtroom triumph for AI firms this week. However, it came with a caveat that the authors could have pitched a winning argument that by training powerful generative AI with copyrighted works, tech firms are creating a tool that could let a sea of users compete with them in the literary marketplace. "No matter how transformative (generative AI) training may be, it's hard to imagine that it can be fair use to use copyrighted books to develop a tool to make billions or trillions of dollars while enabling the creation of a potentially endless stream of competing works that could significantly harm the market for those books," Chhabria said in his ruling. Tremendous amounts of data are needed to train large language models powering generative AI. Musicians, book authors, visual artists and news publications have sued various AI companies that used their data without permission or payment. AI companies generally defend their practices by claiming fair use, arguing that training AI on large datasets fundamentally transforms the original content and is necessary for innovation. "We appreciate today's decision from the court," a Meta spokesperson said in response to an AFP inquiry. "Open-source AI models are powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and fair use of copyright material is a vital legal framework for building this transformative technology." In the case before Chhabria, a group of authors sued Meta for downloading pirated copies of their works and using them to train the open-source Llama generative AI, according to court documents. Books involved in the suit include Sarah Silverman's comic memoir The Bedwetter and Junot Diaz's Pulitzer Prizewinning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the documents showed. "This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful," the judge stated. "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." Market harming? A different federal judge in San Francisco on Monday sided with AI firm Anthropic regarding training its models on copyrighted books without authors' permission. District Court Judge William Alsup ruled that the company's training of its Claude AI models with books bought or pirated was allowed under the "fair use" doctrine in the US Copyright Act. "Use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use," Alsup wrote in his decision. "The technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes," Alsup added in his decision, comparing AI training to how humans learn by reading books. The ruling stems from a class-action lawsuit filed by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who accused Anthropic of illegally copying their books to train chatbot Claude, the company's ChatGPT rival. Alsup rejected Anthropic's bid for blanket protection, ruling that the company's practice of downloading millions of pirated books to build a permanent digital library was not justified by fair use protections.
1News
a day ago
- Business
- 1News
Judge dismisses authors' copyright lawsuit against Meta over AI training
A federal judge sided with Facebook parent Meta Platforms in dismissing a copyright infringement lawsuit from a group of authors who accused the company of stealing their works to train its artificial intelligence technology. The Thursday ruling from US District Judge Vince Chhabria was the second in a week from San Francisco's federal court to dismiss major copyright claims from book authors against the rapidly developing AI industry. Chhabria found that 13 authors who sued Meta 'made the wrong arguments' and tossed the case. But the judge also said that the ruling is limited to the authors in the case and does not mean that Meta's use of copyrighted materials is lawful. 'This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,' Chhabria 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.' Lawyers for the plaintiffs — a group of well-known writers that includes comedian Sarah Silverman and authors Jacqueline Woodson and Ta-Nehisi Coates — said in a statement that the "court ruled that AI companies that 'feed copyright-protected works into their models without getting permission from the copyright holders or paying for them' are generally violating the law. Yet, despite the undisputed record of Meta's historically unprecedented pirating of copyrighted works, the court ruled in Meta's favour. We respectfully disagree with that conclusion.' ADVERTISEMENT Meta said it appreciates the decision. 'Open-source AI models are powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and fair use of copyright material is a vital legal framework for building this transformative technology,' the Menlo Park, California-based company said in a statement. Although Meta prevailed in its request to dismiss the case, it could turn out to be a pyrrhic victory. In his 40-page ruling, Chhabria repeatedly indicated reasons to believe that Meta and other AI companies have turned into serial copyright infringers as they train their technology on books and other works created by humans, and seemed to be inviting other authors to bring cases to his court presented in a manner that would allow them to proceed to trial. The judge scoffed at arguments that requiring AI companies to adhere to decades-old copyright laws would slow down advances in a crucial technology at a pivotal time. "These products are expected to generate billions, even trillions of dollars for the companies that are developing them. If using copyrighted works to train the models is as necessary as the companies say, they will figure out a way to compensate copyright holders for it.' On Tuesday, from the same courthouse, US District Judge William Alsup ruled that AI company Anthropic didn't break the law by training its chatbot Claude on millions of copyrighted books, but the company must still go to trial for illicitly acquiring those books from pirate websites instead of buying them. But the actual process of an AI system distilling from thousands of written works to be able to produce its own passages of text qualified as 'fair use' under US copyright law because it was 'quintessentially transformative', Alsup wrote. In the Meta case, the authors had argued in court filings that Meta is 'liable for massive copyright infringement' by taking their books from online repositories of pirated works and feeding them into Meta's flagship generative AI system Llama. ADVERTISEMENT Lengthy and distinctively written passages of text — such as those found in books — are highly useful for teaching generative AI chatbots the patterns of human language. 'Meta could and should have paid' to buy and license those literary works, the authors' attorneys argued. Meta countered in court filings that US copyright law 'allows the unauthorized copying of a work to transform it into something new' and that the new, AI-generated expression that comes out of its chatbots is fundamentally different from the books it was trained on. "After nearly two years of litigation, there still is no evidence that anyone has ever used Llama as a substitute for reading Plaintiffs' books, or that they even could,' Meta's attorneys argued. Meta says Llama won't output the actual works it has copied, even when asked to do so. 'No one can use Llama to read Sarah Silverman's description of her childhood, or Junot Diaz's story of a Dominican boy growing up in New Jersey,' its attorneys wrote. Accused of pulling those books from online 'shadow libraries", Meta has also argued that the methods it used have 'no bearing on the nature and purpose of its use' and it would have been the same result if the company instead struck a deal with real libraries. Such deals are how Google built its online Google Books repository of more than 20 million books, though it also fought a decade of legal challenges before the US Supreme Court in 2016 let stand lower court rulings that rejected copyright infringement claims. ADVERTISEMENT The authors' case against Meta forced CEO Mark Zuckerberg to be deposed, and has disclosed internal conversations at the company over the ethics of tapping into pirated databases that have long attracted scrutiny. 'Authorities regularly shut down their domains and even prosecute the perpetrators,' the authors' attorneys argued in a court filing. "That Meta knew taking copyrighted works from pirated databases could expose the company to enormous risk is beyond dispute: it triggered an escalation to Mark Zuckerberg and other Meta executives for approval. Their gamble should not pay off.' The named plaintiffs are Jacqueline Woodson, Richard Kadrey, Andrew Sean Greer, Rachel Louise Snyder, David Henry Hwang, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Laura Lippman, Matthew Klam, Junot Diaz, Sarah Silverman, Lysa TerKeurst, Christopher Golden and Christopher Farnsworth. Chhabria said in the ruling that while he had 'no choice' but to grant Meta's summary judgment tossing the case, 'in the grand scheme of things, the consequences of this ruling are limited. This is not a class action, so the ruling only affects the rights of these 13 authors -- not the countless others whose works Meta used to train its models.'
Time of India
2 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
US judge sides with Meta in AI training copyright case
A US judge on Wednesday handed Meta a victory over authors who accused the tech giant of violating copyright law by training Llama artificial intelligence on their creations without permission. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco ruled that Meta's use of the works to train its AI model was "transformative" enough to constitute "fair use" under copyright law, in the second such courtroom triumph for AI firms this week. However, it came with a caveat that the authors could have pitched a winning argument that by training powerful generative AI with copyrighted works, tech firms are creating a tool that could let a sea of users compete with them in the literary marketplace. "No matter how transformative (generative AI) training may be, it's hard to imagine that it can be fair use to use copyrighted books to develop a tool to make billions or trillions of dollars while enabling the creation of a potentially endless stream of competing works that could significantly harm the market for those books," Chhabria said in his ruling. Tremendous amounts of data are needed to train large language models powering generative AI. Musicians, book authors, visual artists and news publications have sued various AI companies that used their data without permission or payment. AI companies generally defend their practices by claiming fair use, arguing that training AI on large datasets fundamentally transforms the original content and is necessary for innovation. "We appreciate today's decision from the court," a Meta spokesperson said in response to an AFP inquiry. "Open-source AI models are powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and fair use of copyright material is a vital legal framework for building this transformative technology." In the case before Chhabria, a group of authors sued Meta for downloading pirated copies of their works and using them to train the open-source Llama generative AI, according to court documents. Books involved in the suit include Sarah Silverman's comic memoir "The Bedwetter" and Junot Diaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," the documents showed. "This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful," the judge stated. "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." Market harming? A different federal judge in San Francisco on Monday sided with AI firm Anthropic regarding training its models on copyrighted books without authors' permission. District Court Judge William Alsup ruled that the company's training of its Claude AI models with books bought or pirated was allowed under the "fair use" doctrine in the US Copyright Act. "Use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use," Alsup wrote in his decision. "The technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes," Alsup added in his decision, comparing AI training to how humans learn by reading books. The ruling stems from a class-action lawsuit filed by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who accused Anthropic of illegally copying their books to train chatbot Claude, the company's ChatGPT rival. Alsup rejected Anthropic's bid for blanket protection, ruling that the company's practice of downloading millions of pirated books to build a permanent digital library was not justified by fair use protections.
Hans India
2 days ago
- Business
- Hans India
Meta wins copyright case over AI training, but legal questions remain
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has won a copyright lawsuit filed by authors including Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The authors accused Meta of using pirated copies of their books without permission to train its AI model, Llama. However, US District Judge Vince Chhabria ruled that the plaintiffs failed to provide adequate evidence that Meta's AI system harmed the market for their works. While the ruling was in Meta's favor, the judge clarified that this case does not confirm that training AI with copyrighted content is legal. Instead, it highlights that the plaintiffs didn't present the right legal arguments. Chhabria emphasized that in many circumstances, using copyrighted materials without permission to train AI would be unlawful. This nuanced stance contrasts with another San Francisco judge's ruling earlier this week in favor of AI firm Anthropic, which deemed such usage fair use. The fair use doctrine is a crucial defense for AI companies, allowing limited use of copyrighted materials without explicit permission. Meta welcomed the decision, describing fair use as vital to building transformative AI systems. Meanwhile, the authors' legal team criticized the judgment, citing an 'undisputed record' of Meta's large-scale use of copyrighted works. The broader copyright battle between AI companies and creators continues to intensify. Companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic face multiple lawsuits from writers, journalists, and publishers over the use of copyrighted materials in AI training. Judge Chhabria warned of a future where AI-generated content could flood the market, undermining the value of original human-created works and disincentivizing creativity. Despite the legal win, the debate over AI's use of protected content is far from over.
UPI
2 days ago
- Business
- UPI
Meta gets partial win in AI-teaching copyright case
June 26 (UPI) -- A federal judge let Meta off the hook for the use of books to train its artificial intelligence model, but it still might face legal challenges by the authors in other ways. United States District Judge Vince Chhabria ruled Wednesday that it wasn't unlawful for Meta to feed copyrighted material to its large language models, or "Llama," because of the doctrine of "fair use." Chhabria wrote in his ruling that the use of copyrighted works by companies to train generative AI models, are using the materials in a creative fashion, which in copyright law is considered a "transformative" use as the Copyright Act says the use of copyrighted materials to teach, research, criticize, comment or report news is not infringement. Conversely, the judge also noted that creating a new product by way of copying a protected work and then marketing that product could potentially harm the markets that carry the original materials. "So by training generative AI models with copyrighted works, companies are creating something that often will dramatically undermine the market for those works," Chhabria wrote. He then questioned if companies that feed copyright-protected materials into their AI platforms without first getting permission from the copyright holders or paying to use the originals are doing something illegal. "Although the devil is in the details, in most cases the answer will likely be yes," wrote the judge. Chhabria then referred to a similar case that concluded on Monday in which U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled the Anthropic artificial intelligence company didn't violate any copyright laws when it used millions of copyrighted books to train its own AI. "Judge Alsup focused heavily on the transformative nature of generative AI while brushing aside concerns about the harm it can inflict on the market for the works it gets trained on," Chhabria wrote. "No matter how transformative [Llama] training may be, it's hard to imagine that it can be fair use to use copyrighted books to develop a tool to make billions or trillions of dollars," Chhabria wrote. "While enabling the creation of a potentially endless stream of competing works that could significantly harm the market for those books." However, part of the lawsuit filed by the authors also alleges that Meta had removed copyright management information, which would violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, and this will be overseen separately. A case management conference on how the court will proceed in regard to the DMCA is scheduled for July 11.
