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Authors said Meta AI training infringed copyrights

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Meta argues it made 'fair use' of writers' books

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Judge says AI can create 'infinite' competing products

(Recasts headline, adds details from hearing throughout)

By Blake Brittain

May 1 (Reuters) - A skeptical federal judge in San

Francisco on Thursday questioned Meta Platforms' ( META )

argument that it can legally use copyrighted works without

permission to train its artificial intelligence models.

In the first court hearing on a key question for the AI

industry, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria grilled lawyers for

both sides over Meta's request for a ruling that it made "fair

use" of books by Junot Diaz, comedian Sarah Silverman and others

to train its Llama large language model.

"You have companies using copyright-protected material

to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite

number of competing products," Chhabria told Meta's attorneys.

"You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating,

the market for that person's work, and you're saying that you

don't even have to pay a license to that person."

"I just don't understand how that can be fair use,"

Chhabria said.

The fair use question hangs over lawsuits brought by

authors, news outlets and other copyright owners against

companies including Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic. The legal

doctrine allows for the use of copyrighted work without the

copyright owner's permission under some circumstances.

The authors in the Meta case sued in 2023, arguing the

company used pirated versions of their books to train Llama

without permission or compensation.

Technology companies have said that being forced to pay

copyright holders for their content could hamstring the

burgeoning, multi-billion dollar AI industry. The defendants say

their AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by

studying it to learn to create new, transformative content.

Plaintiffs counter that AI companies unlawfully copy their

work to generate competing content that threatens their

livelihoods.

Chhabria on Thursday acknowledged that Meta's use may have

been transformative, but said it still may not have been fair.

"This seems like a highly unusual case in the sense that

though the copying is for a highly transformative purpose, the

copying has the high likelihood of leading to the flooding of

the markets for the copyrighted works," Chhabria said.

Meta attorney Kannon Shanmugam said copyright owners are

not entitled to "protection from competition in the marketplace

of ideas."

"But if I'm going to steal things from the marketplace

of ideas in order to develop my own ideas, that's copyright

infringement, right?," Chhabria responded.

Chhabria also told the plaintiffs' attorney David Boies

that the lawsuit may not have adequately addressed the potential

market impacts of Meta's conduct.

"I think it is taken away by fair use unless a plaintiff

can show that the market for their actual copyrighted work is

going to be dramatically affected," Chhabria said.

Chhabria prodded Boies for evidence that Llama's

creations would affect the market for the authors' books

specifically.

"It seems like you're asking me to speculate that the

market for Sarah Silverman's memoir will be affected by the

billions of things that Llama will ultimately be capable of

producing," Chhabria said. "And it's just not obvious to me that

that's the case."