AI News Monitor

A federal judge has ruled in favor of Meta in a copyright lawsuit brought by a group of prominent authors, including Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, marking the second legal victory for the U.S. artificial intelligence industry this week.

The authors had accused Meta of illegally using their books to train its AI system without permission. But in a decision on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco said they failed to provide sufficient evidence that Meta’s AI would harm the market for their work, a key factor in copyright cases.

The ruling comes just days after another federal judge found that Anthropic, a leading AI company, did not violate copyright law by training its models on authors’ works. However, Chhabria’s opinion diverged slightly, suggesting that using copyrighted material to train AI could still be unlawful in “many circumstances.”

“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.”

The case highlights the ongoing legal battle between AI companies and creative professionals over whether training AI on copyrighted material constitutes “fair use”—a doctrine that permits limited use of protected works without permission. While tech firms argue their systems create transformative content, authors and publishers say AI threatens their livelihoods by generating competing works at scale.

Chhabria acknowledged concerns that AI could flood the market with cheap, AI-generated books and articles, undermining human creators. “By training generative AI models with copyrighted works, companies are creating something that often will dramatically undermine the market for those works,” he said.

Meta welcomed the decision, calling fair use a “vital legal framework” for AI development. The authors’ legal team, however, vowed to continue fighting, criticizing Meta’s “historically unprecedented pirating of copyrighted works.”

The lawsuit is one of several targeting AI companies, including OpenAI and Microsoft, as the industry grapples with how to balance innovation with intellectual property rights. With Anthropic facing another trial later this year over its use of pirated books, the legal battles over AI and copyright are far from over.