Training AI models on copyrighted news constitutes fair use

Overview Debates Related claims Topics Sources

Attorneys from Freedman Normand Friedland LLP and Stris & Maher LLP plan to file individual copyright lawsuits against Meta Platforms Inc. on behalf of up to 1,000 additional authors.

The lawsuits filed against Meta Platforms Inc. on October 19, 2026, were brought as individual claims by authors rather than as a class action.

Nearly 300 authors filed five copyright complaints against Meta Platforms Inc. on October 19, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Meta Platforms Inc. argues that using copyrighted books to train AI models constitutes fair use under copyright law because the training transforms copies into new technology.

Anthropic urged US District Judge Eumi Lee on October 21, 2026, to rule that training its chatbot Claude on song lyrics is protected under the fair use doctrine.

In the Kadrey v. Meta Platforms class action, Judge Vince Chhabria ruled Meta's AI training on authors' books was fair use because plaintiffs failed to prove market harm from market dilution.

The $1.5 billion Anthropic class action settlement provides roughly $3,000 to each author who opted into the class.

The complaints allege Meta Platforms Inc. operated a book-scanning program called Project Vellum starting around mid-2025 that purchased and scanned physical books to train its Muse Spark and Muse Glimmer AI models.

The authors' complaints allege Meta Platforms Inc. downloaded e-books from pirate shadow libraries, including LibGen, Z-Library, Anna's Archive, and the Books3 dataset, to train its large language models.

Each author suing Meta Platforms Inc. in the October 19, 2026, individual filings seeks maximum statutory damages under the Copyright Act of up to $150,000 per infringing work.

Plaintiffs in the Kadrey v. Meta litigation argue that BitTorrent seeding constitutes contributory copyright infringement by distributing material to unauthorized third parties.

BitTorrent seeding automatically uploads file fragments to external network users during downloads, creating a distinct act of unauthorized distribution beyond basic downloading.

Meta Platforms defended against discovery by asserting that torrenting decisions resulted from informal team consensus rather than explicit, top-down executive directives.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas S. Hixson of the Northern District of California ordered Meta Platforms to identify every manager and executive who approved BitTorrent downloading, seeding, and seeding mitigation for Anna's Archive and Library Genesis Scimag datasets.

Judge Thomas S. Hixson's discovery order applies to two consolidated lawsuits in Northern California federal court, including the Kadrey v. Meta class action by authors and a complaint by publisher Entrepreneur Media.

Judge Thomas S. Hixson rejected Meta Platforms' team-consensus defense, ruling that every team member participating in group choices is responsive to the court's discovery requests.

Judge Thomas S. Hixson ordered Meta Platforms to reveal what happened to pirated works that were obtained but not ultimately used for AI model training.

Meta Platforms Head of Generative AI Ahmad Al-Dahle approved BitTorrent downloads after engineer Nikolay Bashlykov warned in writing that using the protocol could violate copyright law.

District Judge Vince Chhabria ruled that training AI models on books qualifies as fair use, leaving acquisition and BitTorrent seeding as surviving grounds for copyright liability.

The complaints allege Meta Platforms Inc. used BitTorrent to download pirated books, stripped copyright notices from the files, and passed copies along to other users.