A group of professors who specialize in copyright law have Amicus letter was filed in support of the authors who are suing Meta over allegedly training their Llama AI model on e-books, without permission. The brief states that the use of copyrighted work to train generative model is not “transformative” because it is no different than using the works to educate human writers, which was the original purpose of [authors’] ‘s works. “That training use is not ‘transformative,’ because it is intended to allow the creation of works which compete with the copied work in the same markets. This is a purpose pursued by a company like Meta, making the use undeniably commercial.” Also, on Friday, an amicus brief was submitted in support of the authors. Copyright Allianceis a nonprofit that represents artistic creators in a wide range of copyright disciplines. Association of American Publishers (19459019).
A Meta spokesperson pointed TechCrunch, hours after this article was published, to amicus-briefs filed last week by a smaller group of law professors as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation in supportof the tech giant’s position.
In Kadrey V. Meta, Richard Kadrey and Sarah Silverman as well as Ta-Nehisi coates claim that Meta violated intellectual property rights when it used their e books to train models. The company also claims that they removed the copyright information in order to hide this alleged infringement. Meta has argued that not only does its training qualify as fair use but that the case is dismissed because the authors do not have standing to sue.
U.S. district judge Vince Chhabria dismissed part of the case earlier this month. Chhabria stated in his ruling that the allegation that copyright infringement was “obviously” a concrete injury that would give the authors standing and that they had “adequately” alleged that Meta deliberately removed CMI [copyright management information] from the website to conceal copyright violation.
The court is currently weighing several AI copyright lawsuits, including The New York Times suit against OpenAI.
Updated at 8:36 pm Pacific: Added references of additional amicusbriefs filed on Friday.
Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch’s AI editor. His writings have appeared in VentureBeat, Digital Trends and a variety of gadget blogs, including Android Police and Android Authority, Droid-Life and XDA-Developers. He lives in Manhattan, with his music therapist partner.
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