On the heels of the landmark judgment in favor of Anthropic this week, a judge in another pending AI copyright case, Kadrey v. Meta, ruled for the defendants.
Thirteen authors, including most notably Sarah Silverman, sued Meta for using their copyrighted books, downloaded from “shadow libraries,” to train its large language model (Llama). The court explained, “A shadow library is an online repository that provides things like books, academic journal articles, music, or films for free download, regardless of whether that media is copyrighted.” The most notorious of these is called The Pile.
Even though Judge Chhabria ruled for the defendants, the language of his opinion was extremely favorable to the plaintiffs. The court said, for example: “[B]y training generative AI models with copyrighted works, companies are creating something that often will dramatically undermine the market for those works, and thus dramatically undermine the incentive for human beings to create things the old-fashioned way.” This statement points to the final and most important factor of fair use–effect on the market for the original work–and suggests that, if the case were argued correctly, this factor would weigh in favor of infringement.
The plaintiffs had argued that Llama could reproduce snippets the text of their works, and that Meta’s unauthorized training diminished their ability to license works for AI training. However, the court stated that “Llama is not capable of generating enough text from the plaintiffs’ books to matter, and the plaintiffs are not entitled to the market for licensing their works as AI training data.”
Keep in mind that this same judge had stated in a pervious hearing on this case, “I understand your core theory. Your remaining theories of liability I don’t understand even a little bit.” https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-judge-trims-ai-copyright-lawsuit-against-meta-2023-11-09/
The court implicitly lamented that the plaintiffs did not assert sufficient facts to withstand summary judgment, noting, “Because the issue of market dilution is so important in this context, had the plaintiffs presented any evidence that a jury could use to find in their favor on the issue, factor four would have needed to go to a jury.”
The court strongly hinted that similar cases could benefit from better advocacy. “As for the potentially winning argument—that Meta has copied their works to create a product that will likely flood the market with similar works, causing market dilution—the plaintiffs barely give this issue lip service, and they present no evidence about how the current or expected outputs from Meta’s models would dilute the market for their own works.” This is what one might call a playbook for bringing a more successful claim.
Given the state of the record, the Court has no choice but to grant summary judgment to Meta on the plaintiffs’ claim that the company violated copyright law by training its models with their books. But in the grand scheme of things, the consequences of this ruling are limited.
This particular case is not quite over yet. But removing the infringement claims is a significant win for the defense.
It may be no coincidence that this case came on the heels of Judge Alsop’s opinion only days ago. The order in this Meta case referred specifically to Judge Alsop’s opinion, disagreeing with some of his fair use analysis.
