Meta's AI Training Data Copyright Dispute: Judge Rules in Favor of Authors

Meta faces a copyright lawsuit for using pirated books to train its AI model, Llama. Judge Chhabria ruled that while Meta's downloading was for the "highly transformative" purpose of AI training, this doesn't excuse copyright infringement. The judge noted the inseparability of Meta's downloading and Llama's training, and the possibility that Meta indirectly supported pirate libraries by providing computing power. While Meta hasn't been shown to directly profit from pirate libraries, the judge pointed out that most such P2P file-sharing cases are found to be infringing. The final ruling will favor authors if they can provide evidence that Meta contributed to the BitTorrent network and thus aided pirate libraries.