The decision, handed down on Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco, found that the plaintiffs failed to provide sufficient evidence that Meta’s use of their copyrighted books to train its AI system violated U.S. copyright law.
Insufficient Case, Not a Legal Green Light for Meta
Judge Chhabria was explicit in limiting the scope of his ruling. He emphasized that while the authors' case was dismissed, this outcome does not legalize Meta’s practices in a broader sense.
“This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,” Chhabria wrote. “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.”
He added that using copyrighted work without permission to train AI models could indeed be illegal in many cases, signaling that future lawsuits — if more rigorously argued — might fare differently.
Split Decision Highlights Legal Uncertainty in AI Copyright Law
Chhabria’s opinion notably diverged from a ruling earlier this week by another San Francisco federal judge, William Alsup, who found in a separate case that AI company Anthropic’s training on copyrighted material likely qualified as “fair use.”
The contrast in rulings underscores the uncertain and evolving legal landscape surrounding generative AI and copyright. Courts across the U.S. are beginning to confront novel questions of whether AI companies can lawfully ingest and analyze protected works to build powerful language models.
Plaintiffs and Meta Respond to the Decision
A spokesperson from Boies Schiller Flexner, the law firm representing the authors, said they disagreed strongly with the ruling. They criticized the judge’s conclusion, calling it a dismissal of “an undisputed record” showing Meta’s “historically unprecedented pirating” of copyrighted materials.
Meta, in contrast, welcomed the court’s decision. In a statement, a spokesperson said the company appreciated the ruling and described fair use as a “vital legal framework” for enabling the creation of transformative AI systems like its Llama models.
The lawsuit, filed in 2023, accused Meta of using unauthorized copies of the authors’ books to train its generative AI models without any form of permission or compensation.
A Broader Legal Fight Over AI Training
The case against Meta is one of several major copyright lawsuits currently winding through U.S. courts. Plaintiffs — including authors, news organizations, artists, and software developers — are targeting major AI developers such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic, alleging their copyrighted materials were harvested to train large language models without consent.
The fair use doctrine, a long-standing element of U.S. copyright law, allows for limited use of copyrighted content without permission for purposes such as commentary, education, and transformative use. However, how this applies to machine learning and data ingestion by AI models is a matter of legal firsts — and deep contention.
Judge Expresses Concern Over Creative Industry Impact
While Chhabria ruled against the authors based on technical legal grounds, he expressed sympathy for concerns about the existential threat generative AI poses to creative industries.
“By training generative AI models with copyrighted works, companies are creating something that often will dramatically undermine the market for those works,” Chhabria wrote, “and thus dramatically undermine the incentive for human beings to create things the old-fashioned way.”
He warned that AI’s ability to generate “endless images, songs, articles, and books” in a fraction of the time could flood the market, potentially eroding the economic value of original human-created content.
What Comes Next
Despite the outcome, the ruling leaves the door open for future, better-argued copyright challenges to AI training. Legal experts suggest that plaintiffs will likely regroup with sharper legal strategies, especially given the judge’s remarks that the wrong arguments — not the lack of a real issue — doomed this case.
As generative AI becomes more powerful and widespread, the debate over fair use, intellectual property, and creative ownership will only intensify — and future courts may see the same issues from a different legal vantage point.