Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, California. (Credit: Marc Olivier Le Blanc) Meta Hit With Class Action for Allegedly Using Pirated Books to Train AI Models
Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein and Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard filed a class action on behalf of lead plaintiff Christopher Farnsworth, author of the "Nathaniel Cade" fiction series, against Meta on Tuesday, claiming that it stole "hundreds of thousands" of copyrighted books from a pirated online collection to build its large language model set, "Llama."
October 02, 2024 at 08:36 PM
4 minute read
What You Need to Know
- Meta was hit with a class action in California federal court accusing it of stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books to train Llama, its AI large language model set.
- Meta allegedly downloaded and copied almost 200,000 works from a trove of pirated books.
- Meta was previously sued on similar copyright infringement claims in 2023 by a class of authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman.
Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. is the latest target of litigation aimed at Big Tech companies that allegedly use copyright-protected books to train their artificial intelligence models without the authors' consent.
Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein and Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard filed a class action on behalf of lead plaintiff Christopher Farnsworth, author of the "Nathaniel Cade" fiction series, against Meta on Tuesday, claiming that it stole "hundreds of thousands" of copyrighted books from a pirated online collection to build "Llama," its large language model set. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose, alleged copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. §501. Counsel has yet to appear for the defendant.
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