A federal judge on Wednesday 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 ruling from U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabri 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.
Chhabri 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.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs — a group of well-known writers that includes comedian Sarah Silverman and authors Jacqueline Woodson and Ta-Nehisi Coates — didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday. Meta also didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
“This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,” Chhabri 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.”
