Many law professors accuse Meta of using 'free' books for AI

According to techcrunch, the legal brief (amicus brief) that a group of law professors filed with the Northern District Court of California on Friday (US time) strongly criticized Meta's "fair use" argument. They argued that Meta is demanding ever greater legal rights, far beyond what courts have ever granted to human authors.

“ Using copyrighted books to ‘teach’ AI to create new content is not a big ‘change.’ Because the way AI uses books is not much different from the way humans read books to learn to write – which is the main reason books were created ,” the brief reads.

Meta's new Llama 3 models leverage open-source AI. (Source: Techcrunch)

The law professors also stressed that Meta’s use of copyrighted works to train AI to create products that compete in the same market as the original works is not transformational. Moreover, since Meta is a for-profit company, the commercial purpose of this use is obvious.

Also that day, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (a global trade organization for academic publishers) and the Copyright Alliance (a nonprofit representing creators in many fields) also filed amicus briefs in support of the authors in this lawsuit.

Hours after this article was published, a Meta representative pointed out that last week a small group of other law professors and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed amicus briefs in support of Meta's legal position.

In January, author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, comedian Sarah Silverman, and several others sued Meta for copyright infringement. In a 2023 filing in California federal court, made public on January 8, they alleged that the tech giant used their books without permission to develop its large language model Llama, citing numerous internal company documents.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, acclaimed writer and journalist known for his insightful explorations of race, history and identity. (Source: Techcrunch)

This is just one of a number of lawsuits filed by publishers against AI developers, alleging in some ways that their copyrighted work has been used without permission to develop AI products. The defendants, most of whom are large tech companies, typically argue that they are making fair use of all types of copyrighted material.

Hien Phan (Source: Techcrunch)

Source: https://vtcnews.vn/nhieu-giao-su-luat-cao-buoc-meta-dung-sach-chua-cho-ai-ar937234.html