A federal judge ran with Meta on Wednesday in a trial dealing with the company by 13 book authors, including Sarah Silverman, who claimed that the company had illegally trained AI models in copyright -protected projects.
Federal Judge Vince Chhabria issued a concise decision – It means that the judge was able to decide on the case without sending it to a jury – in favor of Meta, finding that the company’s training for AI models in copyright -protected books in this case fell under the doctrine of “fair use” of the copyright law and was thus lawful.
The decision comes just a few days after a federal judge with humanity in similar action. Together, these cases are shaped to be a victory for the technology industry, which has spent years in legal battles with media companies arguing that the training of AI models in copyright -protected projects is fair use.
However, these decisions are not the sweeping gaining some of the hopes – and the two judges noted that their cases were limited to the scope.
Judge Chhabria made it clear that this decision does not mean that all AI models on copyright -protected projects are legal, but rather that the plaintiffs in this case “made the wrong arguments” and failed to develop sufficient evidence to support the right ones.
“This decision does not support the proposal that the use of copyright protected materials to educate its linguistic models is legal,” Judge Chhabria said in his decision. Later, he said: “In cases of uses such as META, the plaintiffs appear to be often earned, at least when these cases have better developed files on the impact of the defendant’s use of the use.”
Judge Chhabria ruled that the use of copyright -protected works in this case was transformative – which means that the AI models of the company do not just reproduce the authors’ books.
In addition, the plaintiffs failed to convince the judge that the copying of the Meta books has hurt the market for these authors, which is a key factor in determining whether the copyright law has been violated.
“The plaintiffs did not present any important information on the market thinning,” said Judge Chhabria.
Both Anthropic and META wins include the training of AI models in books, but there are several other active lawsuits against technology companies to train AI models in other copyright -protected projects. For example, the New York Times sued Openai and Microsoft to train AI models in news articles, while Disney and Universal sued Midjourney to draw AI models in films and television shows.
Judge Chhabria noted in his ruling that the fair use of fair use are largely dependent on the details of a case and some industries may have stronger arguments of fair use than others.
“It seems that purchases for some types of projects (such as news articles) can be even more vulnerable to indirect competition than AI exits,” Chhabria said.
