09-05-2025
The AI book scraping issue explained
The revelations have sparked widespread outrage among authors and copyright advocates. The Society of Authors called Meta's actions 'appalling', with chief executive Ana Ganley saying: 'Rather than ask permission and pay for these copyright-protected materials, AI companies are knowingly choosing to steal them in the race to dominate the market. This is shocking behaviour by big tech that is currently being enabled by governments who are not intervening to strengthen and uphold current copyright protections. As part of the Creative Rights in AI Coalition, the SoA has been at the heart of the fight and is continuing to lobby against these unlawful and exploitative activities.' Meta's statement
In response, Meta filed a motion to dismiss the case, stating: 'At the crux of this case is an issue of extraordinary importance to the future of generative AI development in the United States: whether Meta's use of publicly available datasets to train its open-source large language models constitutes fair use under U.S. copyright law.'
The company maintains that training AI with data freely available online falls under fair use—an argument that may have far-reaching consequences for the future of AI development. What happens next?
As Kadrey vs. Meta unfolds in the United States, other copyright infringement lawsuits have also been filed against Meta. Meanwhile, some authors are exploring ways to remove their work from pirate libraries like LibGen and Z-Library.
With mounting legal pressure and global scrutiny, the outcome of this case could set a precedent for how AI companies source their training data—and whether creators will finally get a say in how their work is used.
