A federal judge sided with Facebook parent Meta Platforms in dismissing a copyright infringement lawsuit on Wednesday that was brought by authors who accused the company of stealing their works to train its artificial intelligence technology. US District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco found that the group of 13 writers—including comedian Sarah Silverman and authors Jacqueline Woodson and Ta-Nehisi Coates—"made the wrong arguments" and tossed the case, the AP reports. But he also said the ruling is limited to the authors in the case and does not provide Meta license.
"This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful," Chhabria 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." The judge repeatedly indicated reasons to believe that Meta and other AI companies have turned into serial copyright infringers as they train their technology on books and other works created by humans, and seemed to be inviting other authors to bring cases to his court presented in a manner that would allow them to proceed to trial.
While posing the question of whether companies have been engaging in illegal conduct by feeding copyright-protected material into AI training models without permission, the judge wrote: "Although the devil is in the details, in most cases the answer will likely be yes." Chhabria scoffed at arguments that requiring AI companies to adhere to decades-old copyright laws would slow down advances in a crucial technology at a pivotal time. He noted that the products are projected to generate billions or trillions of dollars for the companies developing them. "If using copyrighted works to train the models is as necessary as the companies say, they will figure out a way to compensate copyright holders for it," he said.
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