Recent court filings<\/a> in a lawsuit involving AI copyright against Meta provide further evidence to previous reports<\/a> that the company temporarily halted discussions with book publishers regarding licensing agreements to provide training data for some of its generative! AI models.<\/p>\n These filings pertain to the case Kadrey v. Meta Platforms<\/a> \u2014 one of numerous similar cases currently making their way through the U.S. court system, in which AI companies are being sued by authors and other intellectual property holders. Generally, the defendants in these cases \u2014 AI companies \u2014 argue that training on copyrighted content constitutes \u201cfair use.\u201d In contrast, the plaintiffs \u2014 copyright holders \u2014 strongly disagree with this assertion.<\/p>\n New filings submitted to the court on Friday, which include partial transcripts of depositions of Meta employees taken by the plaintiffs’ attorneys, suggest that certain Meta staff members felt that negotiating licenses for AI training data for books might not be feasible on a large scale.<\/p>\n According to one transcript, Sy Choudhury, who is responsible for Meta’s AI partnership initiatives, stated that Meta’s outreach to various publishers was met with a “very slow uptake in engagement and interest.”<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t recall the entire list, but I remember we had compiled a long list from scouring the internet for top publishers, etc.,\u201d Choudhury said, as per the transcript. \u201cWe didn\u2019t get contact and feedback from a lot of our cold call outreaches to try to establish contact.\u201d<\/p>\n Choudhury added, \u201cThere were a few that did engage, but not many.\u201d<\/p>\n According to the court transcripts, Meta paused certain AI-related book licensing efforts in early April 2023 after encountering \u201ctiming\u201d and other logistical setbacks. Choudhury stated that some publishers, particularly those of fiction books, turned out not to have the rights to the content that Meta was considering licensing, as per a transcript.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d like to point out that, in the fiction category, we quickly learned from the business development team that most of the publishers we were talking to were representing that they did not have the rights to license the data to us,\u201d Choudhury said. \u201cAnd so it would take a long time to engage with all their authors.\u201d<\/p>\n Choudhury noted during his deposition that Meta has, on at least one other occasion, paused licensing efforts related to AI development, according to a transcript.<\/p>\n \u201cI am aware of licensing efforts, such as when we tried to license 3D worlds from different game engine and game manufacturers for our AI research team,\u201d Choudhury said. \u201cAnd in the same way that I\u2019m describing here for fiction and textbook data, we got very little engagement to even have a conversation [\u2026] We decided to build our own solution in that case.\u201d<\/p>\n The counsel for the plaintiffs, who include bestselling authors Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, have amended their complaint several times since the case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division in 2023. The latest amended complaint submitted by the plaintiffs’ counsel alleges that Meta, among other offenses, cross-referenced certain pirated books with copyrighted books available for license to determine whether it made sense to pursue a licensing agreement with a publisher.<\/p>\n The complaint also accuses Meta of using \u201cshadow libraries\u201d containing pirated e-books<\/a> to train several of the company\u2019s AI models, including its popular Llama series of \u201copen\u201d models. According to the complaint, Meta may have secured some of these libraries via torrenting. Torrenting, a method of distributing files across the web, requires that users simultaneously \u201cseed,\u201d or upload, the files they\u2019re trying to obtain \u2014 which the plaintiffs asserted is a form of copyright infringement<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n Introduction to the Case Recent court filings in a lawsuit involving AI copyright against Meta provide further evidence to previous reports that the company temporarily halted discussions with book publishers…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2398,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[533,226,357,304,1629,151,1630],"class_list":["post-5332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-books","tag-copyright","tag-court","tag-lawsuit","tag-licensing","tag-meta","tag-training-data"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/9\/2025\/01\/GettyImages-2173579488.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5332\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fusionmindlabs.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Background on the Case<\/h2>\n
New Filings and Their Implications<\/h2>\n
Testimony from Meta Employee<\/h2>\n
Details of the Outreach Efforts<\/h2>\n
Engagement with Publishers<\/h2>\n
Pausing of Licensing Efforts<\/h2>\n
Rights to License Content<\/h2>\n
Previous Licensing Efforts<\/h2>\n
Alternative Solutions<\/h2>\n
Plaintiffs’ Allegations<\/h2>\n
Use of Shadow Libraries<\/h2>\n
Source Link<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"