Five major publishers and bestselling author Scott Turow filed a class-action lawsuit on Tuesday accusing Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg of personally authorizing the illegal use of millions of copyrighted books and journal articles to train the company’s Llama language models.
Filed in federal court in Manhattan on May 5, the complaint says Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan and McGraw Hill — joined by Turow — allege that Meta “reproduced and distributed millions of copyrighted works without permission, without providing any compensation to authors or publishers, and with full knowledge that their conduct violated copyright law.” The suit further alleges that Zuckerberg “personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement,” and characterizes the company’s conduct as following its famed motto to “move fast and break things.”
The publishers say the works used include titles by high-profile authors on their lists, among them James Patterson, Donna Tartt and former president Joe Biden, and at least two writers who were named Pulitzer Prize winners on Monday, Yiyun Li and Amanda Vaill. The complaint asks the court to certify a class of publishers and authors whose works were allegedly incorporated into Meta’s training data without consent or compensation.
Meta responded in a statement Monday saying the company will “fight this lawsuit aggressively” and defending the legitimacy of training AI on copyrighted material. “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 company wrote.
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The lawsuit opens a new front in an escalating legal battle between the book community and developers of generative AI. Authors and publishers have increasingly taken legal action over the past year, arguing that commercial AI models have been trained on scraped copyrighted content without permission or pay. Last year’s high-profile class action against Anthropic ended with a proposed $1.5 billion settlement, and that deal is due to face a final approval hearing next week.
Legal experts say the Meta case could raise novel issues because it names Zuckerberg personally and targets one of the industry’s largest datasets and best-known AI efforts. If plaintiffs prevail, they could secure damages and push for new licensing requirements or restrictions on how companies assemble training corpora. Meta, for its part, will likely press fair-use defenses and argue that training on copyrighted texts is transformative and lawful — a contention some courts have accepted in related disputes.
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Attorneys for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to requests for additional comment. With this filing in Manhattan, the book publishing industry is signalling it intends to press a coordinated legal challenge to the use of copyrighted written works in the commercial development of generative AI, a dispute that could reshape how large language models are trained and how creators are compensated.
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