A Judge Says Meta’s AI Copyright Case Is About ‘the Next Taylor Swift’

Meta’s copyright battle with a group of authors, including Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, will turn on the question of whether the company’s AI tools produce works that can cannibalize the authors’ book sales.

US District Court Judge Vince Chhabria spent several hours grilling lawyers from both sides after they each filed motions for partial summary judgement, meaning they want Chhabria to rule on specific issues of the case rather than leaving each one to be decided at trial. The authors allege that Meta illegally used their work to build its generative AI tools, emphasizing that the company pirated their books through “shadow libraries” like LibGen. The social media giant is not denying that it used the work or that it downloaded books from shadow libraries en masse, but insists that its behavior is shielded by the “fair use” doctrine, an exception in US copyright ...