Meta Platforms has won a legal victory as the AI sector continues to deal with copyright infringement lawsuits.

The Guardian reported that Meta has won the backing of a judge in a copyright lawsuit brought by a group of authors – in the second such legal victory for big name artificial intelligence (AI) providers.

Earlier this week Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic’s use of books to train its artificial intelligence model Claude was “fair use” and “transformative” since the large language models “have not reproduced to the public a given work’s creative elements, nor even one author’s identifiable expressive style.”

Anthropic win

Amazon-backed Anthropic was sued in August 2024 by three authors who had alleged Anthropic misused their books and hundreds of thousands of others, in order to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude.

The Anthropic class-action lawsuit had been filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, by writers and journalists Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson.

This was considered a significant win for AI companies dealing with multiple copyright infringement lawsuits.

Alsup’s ruling begins to establish the legal limits and opportunities for the industry going forward, it was reported at the time

Meta lawsuit

And now the Guardian has reported a second copyright infringement win for an AI player, after a group of authors, including the the comedian Sarah Silverman had sued both Meta Platforms and OpenAI back in July 2023.

The writers, who included Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, had argued that the Facebook owner had breached copyright law by using their books without permission to train its AI system.

The Guardian reported that the US district judge Vince Chhabria, in San Francisco, said in his decision on the Meta case that the authors had not presented enough evidence that the technology company’s AI would dilute the market for their work to show that its conduct was illegal under US copyright law.

However, the ruling offered some hope for American creative professionals who argue that training AI models on their work without permission is illegal.

Chhabria also reportedly said that using copyrighted work without permission to train AI would be unlawful in “many circumstances”, which goes against the federal judge in San Francisco in the Anthropic case who found on Monday that Anthropic’s AI training made “fair use” of copyrighted materials.

The doctrine of fair use allows the use of copyrighted works without the copyright owner’s permission in some circumstances and is a key defence for the tech companies.

“This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,” Chhabria said. “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.”

Verdict responses

A spokesperson for the Meta case authors’ law firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, told the Guardian that it disagreed with the judge’s decision to rule for Meta despite the “undisputed record” of the company’s “historically unprecedented pirating of copyrighted works”.

However a Meta spokesperson said the company appreciated the decision and called fair use a “vital legal framework” for building “transformative” AI technology.

Copyright owners say AI companies unlawfully copy their work to generate competing content that threatens their livelihoods. Chhabria expressed sympathy for that argument during a hearing in May, which he reiterated on Wednesday.

The judge said generative AI had the potential to flood the market with endless images, songs, articles and books using a tiny fraction of the time and creativity that would otherwise be required to create them.

“So by training generative AI models with copyrighted works, companies are creating something that often will dramatically undermine the market for those works, and thus dramatically undermine the incentive for human beings to create things the old-fashioned way,” Chhabria was quoted by the Guardian as saying.