Five major publishers sue Meta and Zuckerberg for 'massive' copyright infringement over AI training

Major publishers sue Meta for copyright infringement over AI training

May 5 (Reuters) - Publishers Elsevier, Cengage [RIC:RIC:TLACQ.UL], Hachette (ALHG.PA), opens new tab, Macmillan and McGraw Hill (MH.N), opens new tab sued Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, alleging that the tech giant misused their books and journal articles to train its artificial intelligence model Llama. The publishers, as well as author Scott Turow, alleged in the proposed class action complaint, opens new tab that Meta pirated millions of their works and used them without permission to train its large language models to respond to human prompts. Spokespeople for Meta did not immediately respond to a Reuters request ⁠for comment on the complaint on Tuesday. "Meta's mass-scale infringement isn't public progress, and AI will never be properly realized if tech companies prioritize pirate sites over scholarship and imagination," Maria Pallante, president of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement. The publishers allege that Meta pirated works ranging from textbooks to scientific articles to novels including "The Fifth Season" by N.K. Jemisin and "The Wild Robot" by Peter Brown for its AI training. They asked the court for permission to represent a larger ⁠class of copyright owners and an unspecified amount of monetary damages. The lawsuit opens a new front in the ongoing copyright battle between creators and tech companies over AI training, in which dozens of authors, news outlets, visual artists and other plaintiffs have sued companies including ⁠Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic for infringement. All of the pending cases will likely revolve around whether AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by using it to create new, transformative ⁠content. The first two judges to consider the matter issued diverging rulings last year. Amazon- and Google-backed Anthropic was the first major AI company to settle one of ⁠the cases, agreeing last year to pay a group of authors $1.5 billion to resolve a class-action lawsuit that could have cost the company billions more in damages for alleged piracy. Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Boards, Policy & Regulation * Consumer Protection Blake Brittain Thomson Reuters Blake Brittain reports on intellectual property law, including patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets, for Reuters Legal. He has previously written for Bloomberg Law and Thomson Reuters Practical Law and practiced as an attorney.

Meta and Zuckerberg sued by publishers over 'massive' copyright infringement

Meta and its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg face a lawsuit from a coalition of major publishers, alleging the social media platform illegally used copyrighted works to train its Llama AI models. Five publishers -- Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage -- along with bestselling author Scott Turow, are suing the Big Tech company and its founder over "one of the most massive infringements of copyrighted materials in history". According to the filing to the Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, Meta accessed millions of copyrighted books and journal articles from websites hosting pirated material, and also downloaded unauthorised scrapes of "virtually the entire internet" in order to train its generative AI models. The $1.5tn company then reproduced and distributed the material without permission, the filing said. The plaintiffs also claim Zuckerberg "himself personally authorised and actively encouraged the infringement", and that the company deliberately stripped the works of attribution data in order to conceal its training sources. The case is the latest in a string of fierce copyright battles filed by artists, authors and newspapers alleging that AI groups such as Microsoft and OpenAI have used copyrighted content without compensation or permission to train their chatbots. Last year, AI start-up Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5bn to settle a copyright lawsuit over its use of pirated texts to train its models. However, in June, Meta won a similar copyright lawsuit brought by authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Kadrey. Here, the judge ruled that the plaintiffs had not provided enough evidence that the company's AI would harm the market for human-created content by flooding it with AI-generated works, calling this a "potentially winning argument". Meta's usage of the copyrighted material was therefore found to be "fair use" for developing a transformative technology. In a statement on Tuesday, Meta said it would fight the latest lawsuit "aggressively", adding: "AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use." According to the lawsuit, Meta initially sought to negotiate licensing deals with publishers but abandoned them on "Zuckerberg's personal instruction". The publishers argue that authors have been harmed because Llama has been used to produce imitation versions of their works, calling the technology "an infinite substitution machine". They added that AI-generated books were "already flooding the world's largest book marketplace, Amazon, in volumes that materially displace human-authored works". The plaintiffs are seeking unspecified damages and aim to represent a broader group of copyright owners.

Five Publishers and Scott Turow Sue Meta and Mark Zuckerberg

The class-action lawsuit accuses the tech giant and its founder and chief executive of infringing on authors' copyrights. Five major publishers -- Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage -- and the best-selling novelist Scott Turow have filed a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta and its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg. The complaint, which was filed on Tuesday morning in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses Meta and Zuckerberg of illegally using millions of copyrighted works to train their artificial intelligence program Llama, and of removing copyright notices and other copyright management information from those works. The lawsuit asserts that Meta's engineers relied on pirated books and journal articles to train the program by downloading unlicensed copies through websites like Anna's Archive, an open source search engine for piracy sites including LibGen and Sci-Hub. The suit also claims that "Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement." Representatives for Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The plaintiffs argue that Meta's A.I. program poses a threat to the livelihoods of writers and publishers because the technology can be used to quickly produce A.I.-generated copycat books and to summarize the plot and themes of copyrighted books in such great detail that readers don't have to buy them. "These A.I.-generated books are already flooding the world's largest book marketplace, Amazon, in volumes that materially displace human-authored works," the complaint states. The filing cites several authors whose works the plaintiffs claim were used to train Llama, including V.E. Schwab, N.K. Jemisin, Lemony Snicket and Turow. Some of the evidence cited in the complaint purportedly comes directly from Llama. When asked to produce a travel guide in the style of the writer Becky Lomax, Llama rapidly produced "a convincing rendition of Lomax's local insider voice," the complaint says. Then, when asked how it was able to reproduce Lomax's style so accurately, Llama allegedly replied, "While I don't have personal interactions with Becky Lomax, I've been trained on a vast amount of text data, including her published works." Llama is also able to summarize books in detail. When asked to give a synopsis of Turow's "Presumed Innocent," Llama confirmed that it had "been trained on a digital version of the book, which allows me to access and analyze its content," according to the complaint. In an email to The Times, Turow said Meta's use of pirated works amounted to "shameless, damaging and unjust behavior." "I find it distressing and infuriating that one of the top-10 richest corporations in the world knowingly used pirated copies of my books, and thousands of other authors, to train Llama, which can and has produced competing material, including works supposedly in my style," Turow wrote. By producing "knockoffs and imitations" of authors' works, Meta's A.I. program could "dilute the overall market for literary works," the plaintiffs argue. "These outputs are similar enough to copyrighted works -- in subject matter, plot details, sequencing of events, character names and traits, or other creative choices -- that they replace the original work for many readers or consumers," the complaint says. The lawsuit is the latest effort by authors and publishers to rein in tech companies' use of copyrighted works to train their large language models. Writers have brought lawsuits against tech companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI for the companies' unauthorized use of their work. Last fall, Anthropic agreed to pay a $1.5 billion settlement to writers whose books had been used to train its A.I. program. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, as well as Perplexity, accusing the companies of copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies have rebutted the claims.) Authors have challenged Meta in court before. In June 2025, a judge ruled in Meta's favor, finding that the plaintiffs had not presented enough evidence that Meta's A.I. product would create "market dilution" by producing a flood of A.I.-generated books. The lawsuit filed on Tuesday against Meta brought together trade publishers, academic publishers of scientific and medical journals and a best-selling author of legal thrillers. The plaintiffs are seeking an order requiring Meta to destroy all illegally acquired copies of works copyrighted by the plaintiffs that Meta used in A.I. training and to "cease all unlawful activities," as well as requesting any "further relief as the Court deems proper." "We're focused on a much more sustainable A.I. landscape -- something that's transparent and fair and participatory and has guardrails against harm for authors and publishers," said Maria A. Pallante, president and chief executive of the Association of American Publishers, a trade group that acts as a law and policy advocate for the book publishing industry. "The harm is already evident."

Five major publishers are suing Meta over Llama

Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan, and McGraw Hill, joined by author Scott Turow, filed a proposed class action in Manhattan on Tuesday alleging Meta pirated millions of their works to train Llama. After Judge Chhabria's June 2025 ruling, plaintiffs with stronger market-harm evidence have been waiting their turn. On Tuesday morning, five of the world's largest publishers and one of America's best-known novelists walked into a Manhattan federal courthouse and filed a proposed class action complaint against Meta Platforms. Reuters reported the case as Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan, and McGraw Hill, alongside the author Scott Turow, alleging that Meta pirated millions of their books and journal articles to train its Llama large-language models without permission, payment, or licence. The complaint asks the court to certify the case as a class action representing all similarly situated rights holders. It is, by date, the latest in a long line of AI-training copyright cases. By substance, it is meaningfully different from most of those that have come before. Anyone who has been following AI-copyright litigation will recognise the name in the precedent slot: Kadrey v. Meta. That earlier case, filed in 2023 in the Northern District of California by authors including Sarah Silverman, Richard Kadrey, Christopher Golden, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Junot Díaz, and Michael Chabon, made effectively the same allegations: that Meta downloaded copyrighted books from pirate libraries (LibGen, Z-Library, and Anna's Archive) and used them to train Llama. Court records cited by Tom's Hardware established that Meta employees torrented roughly 82 terabytes of pirated material in the process. Mark Zuckerberg personally signed off on the use of LibGen for Llama training, despite internal AI executives flagging it as a "data set we know to be pirated" that could "undermine [Meta's] negotiating position with regulators." And Meta won that case. In June 2025, Judge Vince Chhabria granted summary judgment for Meta on fair-use grounds, finding that the use of copyrighted books to train Llama was sufficiently transformative to clear the fair-use threshold. But Chhabria's ruling was unusually narrow, and unusually candid about its limits. He said publicly that Meta's win "may be in significant tension with reality" and that the ruling applied only to the specific authors who had brought the case. He noted explicitly that future plaintiffs could succeed if they presented stronger evidence of market harm, the prong of fair-use analysis on which the Kadrey plaintiffs had, in his view, fallen short. Tuesday's filing reads, on first inspection, as exactly the kind of case Chhabria invited. There are three structural differences between Kadrey and the new lawsuit, and all three favour the plaintiffs. The first is the catalogue. Where Kadrey involved roughly 666 specific books from a small group of individual authors, the new complaint covers the entire publishing operations of five companies that together account for a substantial share of the world's academic, educational, and trade publishing output. Per Reuters' description of the complaint, titles include not only literary works such as N.K. Jemisin's "The Fifth Season" and Peter Brown's "The Wild Robot" but also textbooks, scientific journal articles, and reference works. The market for those works, particularly the academic and educational categories, is structurally different from the trade-fiction market that dominated the Kadrey plaintiff set. The second is the market-harm evidence. Academic and educational publishers can document, in ways individual authors typically cannot, the specific revenue lines that AI-trained models substitute for. When Llama answers a student's biology question that would otherwise have required consulting a Cengage textbook, the substitution is direct and measurable. The plaintiffs will, on the standard pleadings strategy for a case of this kind, present that substitution as the kind of identifiable market harm Chhabria's June ruling specifically identified as missing from Kadrey. Reed Smith's analysis of the recent fair-use decisions noted that the market-harm prong, more than transformativeness, is now the operative legal battleground. The third is the licensing-market context. Since 2023, AI companies have signed an increasing number of licensing deals with publishers. Meta itself has signed deals with Reuters, CNN, Fox News, People Inc., and USA Today for content licensing. The existence of those licences is, in fair-use law, a significant fact: courts examining the market-harm prong now have evidence that a licensing market exists, that some publishers have priced and negotiated participation in it, and that Meta has chosen to participate in some markets while bypassing others. The new plaintiffs will argue that bypassing them while licensing others is itself evidence of bad faith. Tuesday's case lands against another piece of recent precedent. Anthropic, in a settlement the Authors Guild publicly described as significant, agreed earlier this year to pay authors as part of resolving the Bartz v. Anthropic class action over similar allegations. The settlement amount and terms set a marker for what AI-training copyright cases can produce when they reach a financial resolution rather than an early summary judgment. TNW has tracked Anthropic's broader commercial trajectory through the parallel $1.5bn enterprise services joint venture, the IPO preparations, and the model-deployment programmes; the Bartz settlement is, in financial terms, a manageable line item against that backdrop. For Meta, with its different fact pattern and its prior summary-judgment win, the calculus is different. Settlement is, however, only one possible outcome. The other is that Meta tries the case the way it tried Kadrey, betting that the fair-use defence will hold even against more substantive plaintiffs. The risk in that strategy is asymmetric. A second loss for the publishers would, in effect, settle the question for the entire market: Llama-style training on pirated corpora is fair use even when the plaintiffs are a major industry. A second win would cost the company more in damages and structural remedies than the first case avoided. The new case sits inside a broader legal landscape Meta has been navigating for some time. TNW reported last week on the Meta-New Mexico phase-two trial in Santa Fe, in which the state is seeking algorithm changes, age-verification mandates, and a $3.7bn teen mental-health fund tied to the company's youth-safety record. TNW's analysis earlier this year noted that Meta's mounting child-safety legal exposure could, eventually, cost more than its $145bn AI capex programme. Meta's Q1 2026 capex guidance is now between $125bn and $145bn for the year, an order of magnitude that makes any single litigation outcome look small in absolute terms but that also raises the question of how many simultaneous fronts the company can accept legal exposure on without commercial consequences. There is also the broader regulatory backdrop. TNW has covered Anthropic's Mythos and the Eurogroup's parallel concerns about AI capability and access; that is a different set of regulatory concerns from copyright, but it is part of the same wider story about how AI companies' commercial speed is colliding with multiple categories of slower-moving legal infrastructure. The publishers' Tuesday filing is the copyright instance of that collision. The narrow legal question is whether the use of pirated copyrighted material to train Llama constitutes fair use under US copyright law. The wider question, the one the publishing industry is actually trying to settle, is whether the existing fair-use doctrine, written before generative models existed, can be stretched to accommodate them or whether some new framework, statutory or judicial, has to be built. The Kadrey ruling stretched the doctrine. The new case will test how far the stretch will go. If the publishers win, even partially, the licensing market for AI training data becomes a structural fixture of the industry, with material commercial implications for every model company currently relying on broadly scraped corpora. If they lose, the practice of training on pirated material at scale becomes effectively legally durable in the United States, with the regulatory response shifting to legislatures rather than courts. The procedural calendar will move slowly. Class certification, motions to dismiss, summary-judgment briefing, and trial scheduling will, in the ordinary course, take 18 to 24 months. Investing.com flagged the broader market-screener context around the lawsuit's announcement, noting that several other AI-training copyright cases are now moving through US courts simultaneously, with some likely to reach the appellate level before this one is resolved. The Tuesday filing is, in that sense, a long bet rather than an immediate threat. It is, however, the most credible long bet the publishing industry has yet placed against an AI-training defendant. After Kadrey produced what the Authors Guild called a "technical win" for Meta but a substantive opening for future plaintiffs, the industry has been waiting for the right plaintiff slate to bring the next case. Tuesday's filing names that slate. The litigation that follows will, over the next two years, decide whether Llama's training corpus, and by extension that of every comparable model trained on similarly broad scraped data, was the original commercial sin of the AI cycle or its first widely accepted standard practice. There is no third outcome the courts can produce. Meta will argue, as it argued in Kadrey, that the use is transformative and that no measurable market harm has occurred. The publishers will argue, with documents, accounting, and licensing comparables, that the harm is precisely measurable and that Meta's selective licensing across the industry establishes a market against which its non-licensing of their works can be valued. Judges Chhabria's earlier ruling has, in effect, written the brief for both sides. Whoever sat reading his June opinion most carefully has, on the present evidence, sat down at the publishers' table on Tuesday.

Major publishers sue Meta for copyright infringement over AI training

Hachette, Macmillan and others allege that Meta pirated millions of works from textbooks to novels for Llama model Five major publishers sued Meta Platforms in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, alleging that the tech giant misused their books and journal articles to train its artificial intelligence models. Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan and McGraw Hill, as well as author Scott Turow, alleged in the proposed class-action complaint that Meta pirated millions of their works and used them without permission to train its Llama large language models to respond to human prompts. "Meta's mass-scale infringement isn't public progress, and AI will never be properly realized if tech companies prioritize pirate sites over scholarship and imagination," Maria Pallante, the president of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement. Meta has denied any wrongdoing. "AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use," a Meta spokesperson responded in a statement on Tuesday. "We will fight this lawsuit aggressively." The publishers allege that Meta pirated works ranging from textbooks to scientific articles to novels including The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin and The Wild Robot by Peter Brown for its AI training. They asked the court for permission to represent a larger class of copyright owners and an unspecified amount of monetary damages. The lawsuit opens a new front in the ongoing copyright battle between creators and tech companies over AI training, in which dozens of authors, news outlets, visual artists and other plaintiffs have sued companies including Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic for infringement. All of the pending cases will likely revolve around whether AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by using it to create new, transformative content. The first two judges to consider the matter issued diverging rulings last year. Amazon- and Google-backed Anthropic was the first major AI company to settle one of the cases, agreeing last year to pay a group of authors $1.5bn to resolve a class-action lawsuit that could have cost the company billions more in damages for alleged piracy. The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement as well.

Publishers, author Scott Turow accuse Meta and Mark Zuckerberg of training AI on copyrighted works

Mary Cunningham is a reporter for CBS MoneyWatch. She previously worked at "60 Minutes," CBSNews.com and CBS News 24/7 as part of the CBS News Associate Program. A group of publishers and bestselling novelist Scott Turow are suing Meta and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, alleging that the tech giant used copyrighted material to train Meta's artificial intelligence technology. The class-action lawsuit, filed in a federal court in New York, was brought by Turow and publishers Cengage, Elsevier, Hachette, Macmillan and McGraw-Hill. The plaintiffs allege that Meta scraped millions of copyrighted works from across the internet -- including from "notorious pirate sites" -- and used the content to train Llama, Meta's suite of AI models, without permission. Meta also removed copyright management information from the works to hide the fact that it was training its AI on stolen materials, the lawsuit alleges. Like other chatbots, Llama generates text outputs in response to user prompts. The complaint claims that the AI tool is reproducing versions of original works from novels, journal articles and textbooks, and in some cases recreating verbatim copies. Llama also mirrors certain authors' personal style in its responses, according to the lawsuit. The plaintiffs say Meta's actions are robbing authors and publishers of revenue they would otherwise receive. The suit assigns blame to Zuckerberg, claiming he "personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement" by sidestepping normal licensing procedures. "As a result of Zuckerberg's day-to-day involvement in Meta's AI development, including his authorization for Meta AI to torrent pirate collections to train Llama, Zuckerberg's net worth recently climbed to over $200 billion," the lawsuit says. A Meta spokesperson told CBS News in an email that the company plans to "fight this lawsuit aggressively." "AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use," the spokesperson said in an email. The literary world has previously clashed with AI companies over copyright issues. In a case last year, Anthropic, maker of the AI chatbot Claude, agreed to settle with hundreds of thousands of authors for $1.5 billion, the largest payout for copyright infringement in history, according to The New York Times. The plaintiffs in Tuesday's suit said they are seeking damages.

Major publishers sue Meta for copyright infringement over AI training

Major publishers have filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms in Manhattan federal court. They accuse the tech giant of using millions of their books and journal articles without permission to train its artificial intelligence model, Llama. This legal action marks a new development in copyright disputes over AI training data. The publishers seek monetary damages and class action representation. Publishers Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan and McGraw Hill sued Meta Platforms in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, alleging that the tech giant misused their books and journal articles to train its artificial intelligence model Llama. Assembly Elections 2026 Election Results 2026 Live Updates: Who's ahead in which stateWest Bengal Election Results 2026 Live UpdatesTN Election Result 2026 Live Updates The publishers, as well as author Scott Turow, alleged in the proposed class action complaint that Meta pirated ⁠millions of ⁠their works and used them without permission to train its large language models to respond to human prompts. Spokespeople for Meta did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the complaint on Tuesday. "Meta's mass-scale infringement isn't public progress, and AI will never be properly realized if tech companies prioritize pirate sites over scholarship and imagination," Maria Pallante, ⁠president of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement. The publishers allege that Meta pirated works ranging from textbooks to scientific ⁠articles to novels including "The Fifth Season" by N.K. Jemisin and "The Wild Robot" by Peter Brown for its AI training. They asked the court for permission to represent a larger class of copyright owners and an unspecified amount of monetary damages. The lawsuit opens a new front in the ongoing copyright battle between creators and tech companies over AI training, in which dozens of authors, news outlets, visual artists and other plaintiffs have sued companies including Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic for infringement. All of the pending cases will likely revolve around whether ⁠AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by using it to create new, transformative content. The first two judges to consider the matter issued diverging rulings last year. Amazon- and Google-backed Anthropic was the first major AI company to settle one of the cases, agreeing last year to pay a group of authors $1.5 billion to resolve a class-action lawsuit that could have cost the company billions more in damages for alleged piracy.