A federal judge sided Meta on Wednesday in a lawsuit against the company by 13 book authors, including Sarah Silverman.
Federal judge Vince Chhabria issued a summary judgment. That is, the judge could decide on the case without sending it to the ju judge – in favor of Meta, training the AI model for copyrighted books in this case falls under the doctrine of “fair use” of copyright law and is therefore legal.
The decision comes just days after a federal judge sided with humanity in a similar case. Together, these cases are becoming a victory for the high-tech industry that has spent years in a legal battle with media companies that claim that AI models training will be used fairly in copyrighted works.
However, these decisions are not the drastic victory that some companies have hoped for. Both judges noted that their case is limited in scope.
Judge Chhabria revealed that the decision did not mean that all AI model training on copyrighted works were legal, but that the plaintiff in this case “had a false argument” and failed to develop sufficient evidence to support the correct one.
“The ruling does not represent the proposition that Meta uses copyrighted material to train language models,” Judge Chhabria said in his decision. Later he stated: “It seems that plaintiffs often win when they have applications like meta, at least if these cases have a better developed record of the market effects of defendants’ use.”
Judge Chhabria ruled that it was transformative for Meta to use copyrighted works in this case. In other words, the company’s AI model was more than simply a recreation of the author’s book.
Furthermore, the plaintiffs were unable to convince the judge that Meta would undermine the market for those authors.
“The plaintiffs presented no meaningful evidence regarding market dilution,” Judge Chhabria said.
Both the victory of humanity and meta victorious include training AI models in books, but there are several other aggressive litigation against technology companies to train AI models in other copyrighted works. For example, the New York Times sues Openai and Microsoft to train AI models in news articles, while Disney and Universal sues mid-journey for training AI models in film and TV shows.
Judge Chhabria pointed out in his decision that fair use defenses rely heavily on the details of the case, and that some industries may have a stronger fair use debate than others.
“The market for certain types of works (such as news articles) appears to be even more vulnerable to indirect competition with AI output,” says Chhabria.
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