TLDR: A federal judge has granted partial summary judgment to Meta in a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by Sarah Silverman and other authors, who alleged the tech giant used their copyrighted works to train its AI model Llama without permission. While ruling in Meta’s favor due to the authors’ “poor arguments,” the judge emphasized that the decision does not validate Meta’s use of copyrighted materials and warned that future plaintiffs with stronger arguments are likely to succeed in similar cases.
SAN FRANCISCO – A federal judge has sided with Meta Platforms in a significant copyright infringement lawsuit, granting partial summary judgment to the tech giant in a case brought by a group of prominent authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman, Jacqueline Woodson, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The authors had accused Meta of illegally using their copyrighted works to train its flagship artificial intelligence model, Llama, without obtaining permission or providing compensation.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, in his ruling, expressed a reluctant decision, stating he had “no choice” but to rule in Meta’s favor given what he described as “poor arguments” and “clear losers” presented by the plaintiffs. However, Judge Chhabria was quick to clarify that his decision should not be interpreted as an endorsement of Meta’s conduct. He explicitly stated that the ruling “does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful” and that the public “shouldn’t confuse his decision with a blessing on Meta’s behavior.” Instead, the ruling “stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.”
The lawsuit centered on Meta’s alleged practice of incorporating copyrighted works, such as the authors’ books, into the datasets used to train Llama. The plaintiffs claimed that Meta pirated their unlicensed works from “shadow libraries” online, including Library Genesis and Anna’s Archive, and removed copyright information to conceal their actions. Internal emails unsealed in February 2025 revealed that Meta had downloaded over 81 terabytes of data through Anna’s Archive torrents, in addition to data from LibGen.
Meta, for its part, argued that its use of the authors’ work constituted “fair use,” regardless of how the materials were obtained, and that their use in an AI context was a “transformative” use of the information. However, Judge Chhabria appeared skeptical of this argument, noting that “No matter how transformative LLM training may be, it’s hard to imagine that it can be fair use to use copyrighted books to develop a tool to make billions or trillions of dollars while enabling the creation of a potentially endless stream of competing works that could significantly harm the market for those books.”
The judge’s ruling, delivered on June 25, 2025, is limited to the 13 authors involved in this specific case and does not affect the rights of countless other creators whose works Meta may have used. Judge Chhabria indicated that in future cases, it is “likely that plaintiffs in similar situations as these authors will often win such cases,” particularly if they focus on the theory of “market dilution” – the idea that AI-generated content could significantly harm the market for original works.
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This decision follows another recent ruling from the same courthouse where U.S. District Judge William Alsup found that AI company Anthropic did not break the law by training its chatbot Claude on copyrighted books, but still faces trial for illicitly acquiring those books from pirate websites. The legal landscape surrounding AI and copyright remains complex and evolving, with this ruling serving as a cautionary tale for both AI developers and copyright holders regarding the necessity of robust legal arguments and clear evidence in future disputes.
