Two federal judges ruled in favor of AI companies this week in closely watched copyright lawsuits over training data usage. Meta Platforms escaped a lawsuit from authors including Sarah Silverman and Andrew Sean Greer who claimed the company used millions of copyrighted books without permission to train its Llama AI model.
San Francisco Judge Vince Chhabria ruled that Meta’s use qualified as fair use under copyright law. However, he cautioned that his decision reflected the authors’ poor litigation strategy rather than blanket approval for AI training practices. “This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,” Chhabria stated.
The judge expressed skepticism about the AI industry’s approach, noting it’s “hard to imagine that it can be fair use to use copyrighted books to develop a tool to make billions or trillions of dollars.” He rejected Meta’s argument that requiring payment for training data would harm AI development, pointing out these companies expect to generate massive profits.
A separate ruling favored AI company Anthropic in a similar book-based training dispute. The back-to-back decisions will significantly impact dozens of pending lawsuits against major AI companies including OpenAI and Stability AI.
Meanwhile, Getty Images dropped its primary copyright claims against Stability AI in a London court case, though secondary infringement and trademark claims remain. Getty’s lawyers cited weak evidence and lack of knowledgeable witnesses from Stability AI. The company maintains a separate U.S. lawsuit seeking $1.7 billion in damages.
Sources: Bloomberg Law, TechCrunch