A federal judge is allowing a copyright lawsuit associated with him against Meta to move forward, though he rejected part of the lawsuit.
In Kadrey vs Meta, authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nahisi Coates have claimed that Meta has violated their intellectual property rights using their books to train its models Llama, and that the company removed copyright information from their books to hide the alleged violation.
Meta, meanwhile, has claimed that her training qualifies as a fair use, and argued that the issue should be rejected because the authors have no attitude to ignore. In court last month, US District Judge Vince Chhabria appeared to show he was against dismissal, but he also criticized what he saw as “over-the-top” by the authors’ legal teams.
In Friday’s ruling, Chhabria wrote that the claim of copyright violation is “undoubtedly an injury to sufficient concrete to stand up” and that the authors also “adequately claimed that Meta deliberately removed CMI (Copyright Management Information) to conceal copyright infection.”
“Received together, these claims raise a reasonable, if not particularly strong conclusion” that Meta removed CMI to try to prevent Llama from extracting CMI and discovering that it was trained in copyright protected materials, “Chhabria wrote.
The judge, however, dismissed the perpetrators’ claims about the comprehensive act of accessing and fraudulent computers data in California (CDAFA) because they did not “claim that Meta would enter their computers or servers – only their data (in the form of their books).”
The judicial proceeding has already provided some insights at how Meta approaches copyright, with court appearances by plaintiffs claiming that Mark Zuckerberg granted the Llama Team permit to train models using copyright protected works and that other Meta team members discussed the use of legally controversial content.
The courts are weighing a number of copyright lawsuits for the moment, including the New York Times lawsuit against Openai.
