• Access the copyright lawsuit against Meta here.

A coalition of major publishers — Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan, and McGraw-Hill — along with bestselling author Scott Turow and his company S.C.R.I.B.E., Inc., filed a class action complaint against Meta Platforms, Inc. and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on May 5, 2026.

The plaintiffs allege that the defendants committed extensive copyright infringement by downloading pirated books and journal articles, scraping unauthorised web content and repeatedly using these materials to train successive versions of the Llama AI model, all without paying licensing fees.

According to the complaint, the allegedly infringed material spans textbooks, scientific journals, and popular fiction, including titles such as The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin and The Wild Robot by Peter Brown.

Meta Defends AI Training as Fair Use: A Meta spokesperson dismissed the suit, arguing that courts have already found AI training on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use, and vowed to fight the lawsuit aggressively.

The company’s defence is part of a broader legal strategy that has recently succeeded in U.S. courts. In June 2025, a U.S. federal court ruled in Meta’s favour in a separate lawsuit brought by authors who claimed the company unlawfully used copyrighted books to train its Llama AI models. The court found that the plaintiffs did not sufficiently prove market harm from Meta’s AI systems, a key factor in determining fair use under U.S. copyright law.

The judge ruled that Meta’s use of the books was “highly transformative,” and noted that Llama did not reproduce substantial portions of the original works, even with adversarial prompting. The court also stated that although Meta’s AI business is commercial, commercial intent alone does not preclude a fair use defense. The court also addressed Meta’s alleged use of pirated books separately from the fair use analysis. The judge stated that downloading from shadow libraries does not automatically invalidate a fair use defense, but noted that using pirated repositories may indicate bad faith in certain situations.

Six Legal Counts, a Class Action, and Demands for Injunctions: The complaint brings six counts against Meta and Zuckerberg, covering copyright infringement through torrenting, web scraping, and AI training; distribution of infringing works; contributory infringement by Zuckerberg personally; and violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for stripping copyright management information.

The proposed class covers all legal or beneficial owners of registered copyrights in books with an ISBN or journal articles with a DOI or ISSN that Meta reproduced without authorisation by torrenting or web scraping, distributed by torrenting, or reproduced in connection with training a Llama model.

Plaintiffs seek permanent injunctions to prevent ongoing infringement, statutory damages under the Copyright Act, attorneys’ fees, and a jury trial.

Read more:

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