Latest news with #TaNehisiCoates
Irish Times
3 hours ago
- Business
- Irish Times
Meta wins AI copyright case in blow to authors
Meta's use of millions of books to train its artificial intelligence models has been judged 'fair' by a US federal court on Wednesday, in a win for tech companies that use copyrighted materials to develop AI. The case, brought by about a dozen authors, including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Kadrey, challenged how the $1.4 trillion (€1.2 trillion) social media giant used a library of millions of online books, academic articles and comics to train its Llama AI models. Meta's use of these titles is protected under copyright law's fair use provision, San Francisco district judge Vince Chhabria ruled. The Big Tech firm had argued that the works had been used to develop a transformative technology, which was fair 'irrespective' of how it acquired the works. This case is among dozens of legal battles working their way through the courts, as creators seek greater financial rights when their works are used to train AI models that may disrupt their livelihoods – while companies profit from the technology. READ MORE However, Mr Chhabria warned that his decision reflected the authors' failure to properly make their case. 'This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,' he 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.' IATA Director General Willie Walsh on airline profits, air fares and why the Dublin Airport passenger cap makes Ireland a laughing stock Listen | 35:56 It is the second victory in a week for tech groups that develop AI, after a federal judge on Monday ruled in favour of San Francisco start-up Anthropic in a similar case. Anthropic had trained its Claude models on legally purchased physical books that were cut up and manually scanned, which the ruling said constituted 'fair use'. However, the judge added that there would need to be a separate trial for claims that it pirated millions of books digitally for training. The Meta case dealt with LibGen, a so-called online shadow library that hosts much of its content without permission from the rights holders. Mr Chhabria suggested a 'potentially winning argument' in the Meta case would be market dilution, referring to the damage caused to copyright holders by AI products that could 'flood the market with endless amounts of images, songs, articles, books, and more'. 'People can prompt generative AI models to produce these outputs using a tiny fraction of the time and creativity that would otherwise be required,' Chhabria added. He warned AI could 'dramatically undermine the incentive for human beings to create things the old-fashioned way'. Meta and legal representatives for the authors did not immediately reply to requests for comment. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
US court sides with Meta in authors' copyright lawsuit
A federal judge has ruled in favour of Meta Platforms, dismissing a copyright infringement lawsuit from a group of authors. The authors claimed that Meta had used their works without permission to train its artificial intelligence technology. According to the US District Judge Vince Chhabria, the authors 'made the wrong arguments'. Chhabria also said that 'in the grand scheme of things, the consequences of this ruling are limited. This is not a class action, so the ruling only affects the rights of these 13 authors—not the countless others whose works Meta used to train its models'. The plaintiffs include comedian Sarah Silverman and authors Jacqueline Woodson and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Their lawyer, as reported by AP, said the 'court ruled that AI companies that 'feed copyright-protected works into their models without getting permission from the copyright holders or paying for them' are generally violating the law. 'Yet, despite the undisputed record of Meta's historically unprecedented pirating of copyrighted works, the court ruled in Meta's favour. We respectfully disagree with that conclusion.' Meta has expressed its appreciation for the court's decision. 'Open-source AI models are powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and fair use of copyright material is a vital legal framework for building this transformative technology,' Meta was quoted by the publication as saying. The ruling follows another decision from US District Judge William Alsup, who found that AI company Anthropic did not break the law by training its chatbot on millions of copyrighted books. However, Anthropic must still face trial for acquiring those books from pirate websites. Judge Alsup's ruling highlighted that the AI system's process of distilling from thousands of works to produce its own text was 'quintessentially transformative' and qualified as 'fair use' under US copyright law. The developments come as Meta's investment in Scale AI has boosted the data-labelling startup's valuation beyond $29bn. As part of this deal, Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang will lead Meta's AI efforts while continuing to serve on Scale AI's board. "US court sides with Meta in authors' copyright lawsuit " was originally created and published by Verdict, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site. Sign in to access your portfolio
The Guardian
9 hours ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Meta wins AI copyright lawsuit as US judge rules against authors
Mark Zuckerberg's Meta has won the backing of a judge in a copyright lawsuit brought by a group of authors, in the second legal victory for the US artificial intelligence industry this week. 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 ruling follows a decision on Monday that Anthropic, another major player in the AI field, had not infringed authors' copyright. 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 said that using copyrighted work without permission to train AI would be unlawful in 'many circumstances', splitting with another federal judge in San Francisco who found on Monday in a separate lawsuit 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.' Anthropic also faces a further trial this year after the judge in its case ruled that its copying and storage of more than 7m pirated books in a central library infringed the authors' copyrights and was not fair use. A spokesperson for the Meta case authors' law firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, said 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'. A Meta spokesperson said the company appreciated the decision and called fair use a 'vital legal framework' for building 'transformative' AI technology. The authors sued Meta in 2023, arguing the company misused pirated versions of their books to train its AI system Llama without permission or compensation. The copyright issue has pitted AI companies against publishers and the creative industries on both sides of the Atlantic because generative AI models – the term for technology that underpins powerful tools such as the ChatGPT chatbot – have to be trained on a vast amount of publicly available data in order to generate their responses. Much of that data has included copyright-protected works. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion The lawsuit is one of several copyright cases brought by writers, news outlets and other copyright owners against companies including OpenAI, Microsoft and Anthropic over their AI training. AI companies argue their systems make fair use of copyrighted material by studying it to learn to create new, transformative content, and that being forced to pay copyright holders for their work could hamstring the growing AI industry. 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 said.
Associated Press
18 hours ago
- Business
- Associated Press
Judge dismisses authors' copyright lawsuit against Meta over AI training
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.' On Monday, from the same courthouse, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that AI company Anthropic didn't break the law by training its chatbot Claude on millions of copyrighted books, but the company must still go to trial for illicitly acquiring those books from pirate websites instead of buying them. But the actual process of an AI system distilling from thousands of written works to be able to produce its own passages of text qualified as 'fair use' under U.S. copyright law because it was 'quintessentially transformative,' Alsup wrote. Chhabria, in his Meta ruling, criticized Alsup's reasoning on the Anthropic case, arguing that 'Alsup focused heavily on the transformative nature of generative AI while brushing aside concerns about the harm it can inflict on the market for the works it gets trained on.' Chhabria suggested that a case for such harm can be made. In the Meta case, the authors had argued in court filings that Meta is 'liable for massive copyright infringement' by taking their books from online repositories of pirated works and feeding them into Meta's flagship generative AI system Llama. Lengthy and distinctively written passages of text — such as those found in books — are highly useful for teaching generative AI chatbots the patterns of human language. 'Meta could and should have paid' to buy and license those literary works, the authors' attorneys argued. Meta countered in court filings that U.S. copyright law 'allows the unauthorized copying of a work to transform it into something new' and that the new, AI-generated expression that comes out of its chatbots is fundamentally different from the books it was trained on. 'After nearly two years of litigation, there still is no evidence that anyone has ever used Llama as a substitute for reading Plaintiffs' books, or that they even could,' Meta's attorneys argued. Meta says Llama won't output the actual works it has copied, even when asked to do so. 'No one can use Llama to read Sarah Silverman's description of her childhood, or Junot Diaz's story of a Dominican boy growing up in New Jersey,' its attorneys wrote. Accused of pulling those books from online 'shadow libraries,' Meta has also argued that the methods it used have 'no bearing on the nature and purpose of its use' and it would have been the same result if the company instead struck a deal with real libraries. Such deals are how Google built its online Google Books repository of more than 20 million books, though it also fought a decade of legal challenges before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 let stand lower court rulings that rejected copyright infringement claims. The authors' case against Meta forced CEO Mark Zuckerberg to be deposed, and has disclosed internal conversations at the company over the ethics of tapping into pirated databases that have long attracted scrutiny. 'Authorities regularly shut down their domains and even prosecute the perpetrators,' the authors' attorneys argued in a court filing. 'That Meta knew taking copyrighted works from pirated databases could expose the company to enormous risk is beyond dispute: it triggered an escalation to Mark Zuckerberg and other Meta executives for approval. Their gamble should not pay off.' 'Whatever the merits of generative artificial intelligence, or GenAI, stealing copyrighted works off the Internet for one's own benefit has always been unlawful,' they argued. The named plaintiffs are Jacqueline Woodson, Richard Kadrey, Andrew Sean Greer, Rachel Louise Snyder, David Henry Hwang, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Laura Lippman, Matthew Klam, Junot Diaz, Sarah Silverman, Lysa TerKeurst, Christopher Golden and Christopher Farnsworth. Most of the plaintiffs had asked Chhabria to rule now, rather than wait for a jury trial, on the basic claim of whether Meta infringed on their copyrights. Two of the plaintiffs, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Christopher Golden, did not seek such summary judgment. Chhabri said in the ruling that while he had 'no choice' but to grant Meta's summary judgment tossing the case, 'in the grand scheme of things, the consequences of this ruling are limited. This is not a class action, so the ruling only affects the rights of these 13 authors -- not the countless others whose works Meta used to train its models.'
Forbes
20-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Supreme Court Won't Take Up Case Because Too Many Justices Recused Themselves
Topline The Supreme Court declined Monday to take up a copyright dispute case because it lacked a quorum after five justices had to recuse themselves, a move that was cheered by ethics watchdogs as the high court has repeatedly come under scrutiny for alleged ethics issues. The Supreme Court said Monday it would not take up the case Ralph W. Baker, Jr. v. Ta-Nehisi Coates et al, a copyright dispute in which Baker alleged Coates' book 'The Water Dancer' plagiarized Baker's book 'Shock Exchange: How Inner-City Kids From Brooklyn Predicted the Great Recession and the Pain Ahead.' The court said it lacked a quorum to hear the case, after five of the court's nine justices—Justices Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor—all recused themselves. The justices did not give a reason for why they were recusing and the court has not responded to a request for comment, but Barrett, Gorsuch, Jackson and Sotomayor all published books through Penguin Random House, whose parent company Bertelsmann was named as a party in the case. It's unclear why Alito recused himself from the case, though judicial ethics watchdog Fix the Court speculates it's possible he could have purchased stock in one of the other parties named in the case, such as Apple, Warner Bros. or Disney, or Amazon, which owns MGM Studios, a party in the suit. The justices who didn't have ethical conflicts determined the case 'cannot be heard' as a result of the lack of a quorum, meaning a lower court ruling against Baker will stand. Crucial Quote 'Fix the Court has for many years said that the justices should recuse from petitions involving companies — i.e., their publishers — that pay them thousands if not millions of dollars nearly every year in advances, royalties or both,' Fix the Court said in a statement Monday about the recusals. 'And now they've finally done it.' Surprising Fact Monday's recusals are only the third time that justices have recused themselves from cases since the court adopted a new—non-binding— code of ethics in November 2023. Barrett recused from a case involving a childhood friend, and Gorsuch stepped down from hearing a case this term that stands to benefit billionaire Philip Anschutz, his friend and former client. The court's code of ethics directs justices to recuse themselves from such cases, but doesn't impose any penalties if they don't. Key Background The 6-3 conservative Supreme Court has faced increasing criticism in recent years over ethics concerns, as Democrats and ethics experts have protested numerous reports uncovering potential conflicts of interests. Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas have faced the most allegations, as Thomas' wife's right-wing activism and the justice's lucrative friendship with oil magnate Harlan Crow have drawn widespread scrutiny. Alito also faced calls to recuse himself from cases involving the 2020 election and Jan. 6 riot, after reports surfaced showing flags associated with the 'Stop the Steal' movement flying outside his homes. Both justices have denied any wrongdoing or ethical conflicts. While the justices adopted a new, non-binding ethics code in 2023 in response to the criticism, Democrats' efforts to impose stricter controls on the justices have so far fallen flat. Republicans' opposition to any efforts to rein in the court have killed the hopes of any ethics legislation making it through Congress, and while justices have publicly said in the past that the court was considering a code of ethics, it has not taken any steps past the voluntary code imposed in 2023.
