Publishers and Author Scott Turow Sue Meta and Mark Zuckerberg Over AI Training Data

Five publishers and author Scott Turow have filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Meta Platforms Inc. and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, alleging the company copied copyrighted books and articles to train its artificial-intelligence systems, including the Llama generative AI model.

The complaint was filed Tuesday, May 5, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. It names Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage, along with Turow, and seeks unspecified monetary damages for alleged copyright infringement.

Allegations in the complaint

The lawsuit alleges that Meta and Zuckerberg illegally torrented millions of copyrighted books and journal articles from pirate sites and used unauthorized web scrapes of “virtually the entire internet” to build their AI systems. The filing describes the alleged conduct as one of the most extensive infringements of copyrighted materials in history.

The complaint also alleges that Meta, under Zuckerberg’s direction, deliberately circumvented copyright-protection mechanisms. It further claims Meta considered licensing content for AI training, with a potential budget of up to $200 million, but abandoned that approach in April 2023 asourceser the matter was escalated to Zuckerberg.

Meta’s response

A Meta spokesperson said the company would “fight this lawsuit aggressively,” citing prior court rulings that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use.