Judge in Meta case warns AI could 'obliterate' market for original works

A sceptical federal judge in San Francisco on Thursday questioned Meta Platforms' argument that it can legally use copyrighted works without permission to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models.

In the first court hearing on a key question for the AI industry, US district judge Vince Chhabria grilled lawyers for both sides about Meta's request for a ruling that it made “fair use” of books by Junot Diaz, comedian Sarah Silverman and others to train its Llama large language model.

“You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products,” Chhabria told Meta's attorneys.

“You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person's work and you're saying you don't have to pay a licence to that person.

“I don't understand how that can be fair use.”

The fair use question hangs over lawsuits brought by authors, news outlets and other copyright owners against companies including Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic. The legal doctrine allows the use of copyrighted work without the copyright owner's permission under some circumstances.

The authors in the Meta case sued in 2023, arguing the company used pirated versions of their books to train Llama without permission or compensation.

Technology companies have said being forced to pay copyright holders for their content could hamstring the burgeoning, multibillion-dollar AI industry. The defendants say their AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by studying it to learn to create new, transformative content.

Plaintiffs counter that AI companies unlawfully copy their work to generate competing content that threatens their livelihoods.

Chhabria on Thursday acknowledged Meta's use may have been transformative, but said it still may not have been fair.

“This seems like a highly unusual case in the sense that though the copying is for a highly transformative purpose, the copying has the high likelihood of leading to the flooding of the markets for the copyrighted works,” Chhabria said.

Meta attorney Kannon Shanmugam said copyright owners are not entitled to “protection from competition in the marketplace of ideas”.

“But if I'm going to steal things from the marketplace of ideas to develop my own ideas, that's copyright infringement, right?” Chhabria responded.

Chhabria also told the plaintiffs' attorney David Boies that the lawsuit may not have adequately addressed the potential market impacts of Meta's conduct.

“It is taken away by fair use unless a plaintiff can show the market for their copyrighted work is going to be dramatically affected,” Chhabria said.

Chhabria prodded Boies for evidence that Llama's creations would affect the market for the authors' books specifically.

“It seems you're asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman's memoir will be affected by the billions of things Llama will ultimately be capable of producing,” Chhabria said. “And it's not obvious to me that that's the case.”

Reuters