Judge rules for Meta in dispute with authors

A federal judge in San Francisco has ruled for Meta Platforms against a group of authors who had argued that its use of their books without permission to train its artificial intelligence system infringed their copyrights. US District Judge Vince Chhabria said the authors had not presented sufficient evidence that Meta’s AI would dilute the market for their work to demonstrate that the company’s conduct was illegal under US copyright law. Chhabria nevertheless said that the use of copyrighted work without permission to train AI would be unlawful in “many circumstances,” observing: “This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful . . . It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.” The ruling follows a decision on Monday that Anthropic, another major player in the AI field, had not infringed authors’ copyright.