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The
class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in Manhattan,
accuses the tech giant of copyright infringement and opens up a
new front in the ongoing battle between the book community and
developers of AI.
The plaintiffs allege that Zuckerberg and Meta “followed their
well-known motto ‘move fast and break things’" by illegally
drawing upon a massive trove of books and journal articles for
Llama.
“Defendants reproduced and distributed millions of copyrighted
works without permission, without providing any compensation to
authors or publishers, and with full knowledge that their
conduct violated copyright law,” the complaint reads in part.
“Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively
encouraged the infringement."
Authors published by the five companies suing — Elsevier,
Cengage, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan and McGraw Hill —
include Turow, James Patterson, Donna Tartt, former President
Joe Biden and at least two of the Pulitzer Prize winners
announced Monday, Yiyun Li and Amanda Vaill.
In a statement Monday, Meta vowed to “fight this lawsuit
aggressively.”
“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," the statement reads in part.
Over the past few years, numerous authors have pursued legal
action involving AI. In 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5
billion to settle a class action suit initiated by thriller
novelist Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and
Kirk Wallace Johnson. A final approval hearing is scheduled for
next week.
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