A coalition of professors specializing in copyright law has submitted an amicus brief in support of writers who are suing Meta, alleging that the company trained its Llama AI models on e-books without obtaining permission.

The brief, which was filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, characterizes Meta’s fair use defense as “a remarkable request for greater legal privileges than courts have ever granted to human authors.”

According to the brief, “the utilization of copyrighted works to train generative models is not ‘transformative’ because it does not differ significantly from using these works to educate human authors, which is a primary purpose of the authors’ works.” It further states, “this training use is also not ‘transformative’ because its purpose is to facilitate the creation of works that compete with the copied works in the same markets, a purpose that, when pursued by a for-profit entity like Meta, renders the use unmistakably ‘commercial.'”

The International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers, a global trade association representing academic and professional publishers, also filed an amicus brief in support of the authors on Friday.

Following the publication of this article, a Meta spokesperson drew TechCrunch’s attention to amicus briefs submitted by a smaller group of law professors and the Electronic Frontier Foundation last week, which support the tech giant’s legal stance.

In the case of Kadrey v. Meta, authors such as Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates have alleged that Meta infringed upon their intellectual property rights by using their e-books to train models and removing copyright information from these e-books to conceal the alleged infringement. In response, Meta claims that its training qualifies as fair use and that the case should be dismissed due to the authors’ lack of standing to sue.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria allowed the case to proceed, although he dismissed a portion of it. In his ruling, Chhabria stated that the allegation of copyright infringement constitutes “a concrete injury sufficient for standing” and that the authors have “sufficiently alleged that Meta intentionally removed CMI [copyright management information] to conceal copyright infringement.”

The courts are currently considering several AI copyright lawsuits, including The New York Times’ suit against OpenAI.

Updated 3:36 p.m. Pacific: References to the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers’ amicus brief, as well as amicus briefs submitted in support of Meta’s position last week, have been added.