Meta’s copyright war with a group of authors, including Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, will open up the question of whether the company’s AI tools produce works that cannibalize the author’s books to sell.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, everyone made a motion for partial summary judgment, which took hours of attorneys, meaning they wanted Chhabria to decide on specific issues in the case, rather than letting everyone decide at trial. The authors claim that Meta illegally used their work to build the AI tools it generated, highlighting the company’s pirated books through “shadow libraries” such as Libgen. The social media giant does not deny that it uses works or downloads books from large collections, but insists that its actions are obscured by the doctrine of “fair use”, an exception to U.S. copyright law that allows in some cases, including imitation, teaching, and news reporting, no right to use copyrighted works.
If Chhabria approves any motion, he will sign a ruling before the case goes to trial and may hold a trial for how the court handles the generated AI copyright case. Kadrey v. Meta It is one of dozens of lawsuits filed against AI companies entangled through the US legal system.
Although the author focuses heavily on the pirated elements of the case, Chhabria stressed that his belief is that the biggest question is whether Meta’s AI tools will harm book sales, which would otherwise lead to the author’s losses. He told Meta Lawyer Kannon Shanmugam. “If you are changing dramatically, you might even say that the market where that person works is the market where that person works, and you don’t even have to pay that person a license to use their job to create products that are destroying the product that they work – I just don’t understand that this is fair use,” he told Meta Lawyer Lawyer Kannon Shanmugam. (Shanmugam replied that the recommended effect is “just guess”.)
Chhabria and Shanmugam continue to debate whether Taylor Swift has sent its music to AI tools, and then created billions of robotic counterfeits. Chhabria questioned how this would affect less established songwriters. “What about the next Taylor Swift?” he asked, saying that if the model made “billion-pop songs” in his style, his work could be hampered by the “relatively unknown artists” that the Mono’s work ingested.
Sometimes this sounds like a loss for the author, Chhabria notes that if the plaintiffs can prove that Meta’s tools have created similar works that cratered the money they earned from their work, then Chhabria is “doomed to fail”. But Chhabria also stressed that he did not believe that the author would be able to show the necessary evidence. When he turned to the author’s legal team led by high-profile attorney David Boies, David Boies repeatedly asked the plaintiffs if they could actually prove that the AI tools accused Meta could hurt its business prospects. “It seems like you want me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman’s memoirs will be affected,” he told Boyce. “It’s not obvious to me.”
