Judge reluctantly clears Meta of copyright violation in his bombshell fair use ruling
Vince Chhabria chastises authors' lawyers for failing to demonstrate market harm
WHAT’S HAPPENED?
A US JUDGE last night sided with Meta in a major copyright lawsuit brought by authors who’d accused the hi-tech of stealing their books to train its AI model. But while district judge Vince Chhabria ruled Meta was justified in claiming fair use under US copyright law, he made clear he could have reached a different conclusion had lawyers for the 13 authors offered compelling evidence that they’d been financially damaged by the unauthorised use of their works.
In the absence of that evidence, and their lawyers’ “half-hearted argument” that Meta’s copying had caused or threatened “significant market harm”, Judge Chhabria said he had no choice but to hand victory to Meta while stressing the consequences of his ruling were limited to the rights of the 13 authors and “not the countless others whose works Meta used to train its models”.
The authors — who include Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman and Christopher Golden — filed their lawsuit against the Facebook owner in 2023 claiming it had trained its Llama large language model (LLM) on pirated copies of their books contained in the notorious LibGen dataset. Meta didn’t dispute that but claimed its actions were protected by the US Copyright Act’s fair use doctrine. Courts decide on a case-by-case basis whether fair use is applicable after considering whether use of the works is commercial; the degree to which the works are imaginative or factual; the quantity of the copyrighted material that’s been used; and, crucially, whether the unauthorised use “harms the existing or future market for the copyright owner’s original work”.
It was that fourth factor that last month dominated Judge Chhabria’s questions to lawyers for the authors and Meta who’d asked him to come to a decision on fair use now rather than later in a trial. Chhabria told Meta: “You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person’s work, and you’re saying that you don’t even have to pay a licence to that person. I just don’t understand how that can be fair use.” But Chhabria also questioned whether the authors’ lawyers had demonstrated that Meta’s copyright violations had actually impacted their livelihoods.
Judge Chhabria returned to both themes in his eagerly-awaited 40-page ruling which declared Meta’s use of the authors’ works had been “transformative” — defined by the fair use doctrine as uses that “add something new ... and do not substitute for the original use of the work”.
“No matter how transformative LLM training may be, it’s hard to imagine that it can be fair use to use copyrighted books to develop a tool to make billions or trillions of dollars while enabling the creation of a potentially endless stream of competing works that could significantly harm the market for those books,” wrote Chhabria. That left the onus on the authors’ lawyers to argue decisively that their clients had been harmed. Had they “presented any evidence that a jury could use to find in their favour on the issue, factor four would have needed to go to a jury,” said Chhabria.
“Absent such evidence and in light of Meta’s evidence, the fourth factor can only favour Meta. Therefore, on this record, Meta is entitled to summary judgment on its fair use defence to the claim that copying these plaintiffs’ books for use as LLM training data was infringement,” he concluded.
WHY SHOULD WE CARE?
✨ You wait years for a landmark ruling on fair use and two turn up. On Monday in the same San Francisco courthouse US district judge William Alsup declared AI-start-up Anthropic’s unauthorised use of books to train its generative models didn’t break US copyright law. However, Judge Alsup also ruled that Anthropic’s storage of over 7 million copies of pirated books used to “build a central library” was not justified by the fair use exception and said a trial would decide the resulting damages. Chhabria referenced Alsup’s remarks on the transformative nature of generative AI and accused him of “brushing aside concerns about the harm it can inflict on the market for the works it gets trained on”. There’s plenty more creator-friendly wording in Chhabria’s ruling, including his demolition of the Big Tech lobbying point that decisions made against them would impede AI’s development. “The suggestion that adverse copyright rulings would stop this technology in its tracks is ridiculous,” wrote Chhabria. “These products are expected to generate billions, even trillions, of dollars for the companies that are developing them. If using copyrighted works to train the models is as necessary as the companies say, they will figure out a way to compensate copyright holders for it.” And on the very first page of his ruling he calls out the hi-techs for having been “unable to resist the temptation to feed copyright-protected materials into their models — without getting permission from the copyright holders or paying them for the right to use their works for this purpose”. By stressing the limited nature of his ruling Chhabria is leaving the door open to further lawsuits but he’s also telling those taking on the hi-techs — including Meta — that they need to gather and present evidence that demonstrates market harm. If they don’t then they too will lose.
RELATED:
◾️Further coverage on AI and copyright and other developments that threaten to reshape the global human-made media landscape in tomorrow’s Weekly Newsletter
if I read his opinion correctly, hes basically saying ‘Id really like to find infringement here, but this particular lawsuit is just really weak. Which it is, other plaintiffs have much stronger cases
Certainly a more persuasive use of the word "obliterate' than elsewhere this week...