Five of the world’s largest publishing houses and bestselling author Scott Turow have filed a class-action lawsuit against Meta and its founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging willful copyright infringement on a massive scale in the development of Meta’s Llama large language models. The plaintiffs, comprising Elsevier, Cengage Learning, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, and McGraw Hill, brought the suit as a unified effort by companies across the academic, education, and trade publishing sectors, seeking to hold Meta and Zuckerberg responsible for what they describe as broadly damaging and self-interested misconduct.
The lawsuit alleges that Meta and Zuckerberg deliberately circumvented copyright-protection mechanisms, and that the company had considered paying to license the works before abandoning that strategy at Zuckerberg’s personal instruction. According to the complaint, after the release of Llama 1, Meta briefly explored entering into licensing deals with major publishers and discussed increasing its dataset licensing budget to as much as $200 million between January and April 2023. But in early April 2023, Meta abruptly stopped its licensing strategy after the question of whether to license or use copyrighted material was escalated to Zuckerberg, following which Meta’s business development team received verbal instructions to stop licensing efforts, with one Meta employee describing the rationale as: if we license even a single book, we won’t be able to lean into the fair use strategy. The suit further alleges that Meta stripped copyright management information from the works it used, doing so to conceal its training sources and facilitate their unauthorized use.
Meta responded by defending its position on fair use grounds, with a spokesperson stating that courts have rightly found that training artificial intelligence on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use, and pledging to fight the lawsuit aggressively. The case adds to a growing wave of copyright and intellectual property disputes that could set precedents for how creative content is used in emerging technologies, with courts having issued divergent rulings on fair use in artificial intelligence training so far. The broader legal landscape for AI companies on this issue remains unsettled. Anthropic became the first major artificial intelligence company to settle one of these cases, agreeing to pay a group of authors $1.5 billion to resolve a class-action lawsuit that could have cost the company billions more in damages for alleged copyright violations. Earlier attempts by authors to sue Meta directly had not succeeded, with a federal judge rejecting a claim brought by 13 authors in June 2025, but the current lawsuit argues that the conduct alleged places Meta’s actions firmly outside the protections afforded by fair use provisions of United States copyright law, particularly given the evidence of deliberate decision-making at the executive level to avoid licensing arrangements.
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