Publishers and Scott Turow Sue Meta Over AI Training

Five major publishing houses—Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier, and Cengage—alongside novelist Scott Turow filed a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta Platforms Inc. and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs allege that Meta pirated millions of books and journal articles from repositories including Anna's Archive, LibGen, and Sci-Hub to train its Llama AI models.

The lawsuit claims Mark Zuckerberg personally authorized the infringement after Meta abandoned a 2023 plan to spend up to $200 million on dataset licensing in favor of a fair use legal strategy. Plaintiffs argue that Llama generates competing works that displace human authors, depriving them of compensation. They are seeking monetary damages, a full accounting of training materials, and the destruction of illegally acquired data.

Meta has denied the allegations, asserting that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use. The company stated it intends to fight the litigation aggressively.