U.S. judge trims AI copyright lawsuit against Meta

A California federal judge will dismiss, for now, part of a copyright lawsuit brought by authors against Meta over copyrighted materials being used for AI.

A California federal judge said on Thursday that he would dismiss, for now, part of a copyright lawsuit brought by comedian Sarah Silverman and other authors against Meta Platforms over its artificial-intelligence system Llama.

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria said at a hearing that he would grant Meta's motion to dismiss the authors' allegations that text generated by Llama infringes their copyrights. Chhabria also indicated that he would give the authors permission to amend most of their claims.

Meta has not yet challenged the authors' central claim in the case that it violated their rights by using their books as part of the data used to train Llama.

"I understand your core theory," Chhabria told attorneys for the authors. "Your remaining theories of liability I don't understand even a little bit."

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The lawsuit is one of several brought by copyright owners against tech companies over their generative AI systems. The cases largely revolve around the high-stakes question of whether the unauthorised use of copyrighted works to train AI is allowable.

The authors sued Meta and Microsoft-backed OpenAI in July. They argued that the companies infringed their copyrights by using their books to train AI language models, and separately said that the models' output also violates their copyrights.