A federal judge has ruled that a copyright lawsuit against Meta related to AI can proceed, although a portion of the suit has been dismissed.

The lawsuit, titled Kadrey vs. Meta, alleges that Meta has infringed on the intellectual property rights of authors such as Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates by utilizing their books to train its Llama AI models. Furthermore, the authors claim that Meta removed copyright information from their books in an attempt to conceal the alleged infringement.

In response, Meta contends that its use of the authors’ works constitutes fair use and argues that the lawsuit should be dismissed due to the authors’ lack of standing to bring the suit. During a court hearing last month, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria appeared to suggest that he was opposed to dismissal, but also criticized the “over-the-top” rhetoric employed by the authors’ legal teams.

In a ruling issued on Friday, Judge Chhabria stated that the allegation of copyright infringement constitutes a “concrete injury sufficient for standing” and that the authors have adequately alleged Meta’s intentional removal of copyright management information (CMI) to conceal copyright infringement.

Chhabria’s ruling noted that the allegations collectively raise a “reasonable, if not particularly strong inference” that Meta removed CMI in an effort to prevent its Llama model from outputting CMI and thereby revealing that it was trained on copyrighted material.

However, the judge did dismiss the authors’ claims related to the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA), as they failed to allege that Meta accessed their computers or servers, instead only accessing their data in the form of their books.

This lawsuit has already provided insight into Meta’s approach to copyright, with court filings from the plaintiffs alleging that Mark Zuckerberg granted the Llama team permission to train their models using copyrighted works, and that other Meta team members discussed the use of potentially infringing content for AI training.

The courts are currently considering several AI-related copyright lawsuits, including a lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI, which highlights the ongoing debate surrounding AI and copyright infringement.