Judge Vince Chhabria At Center Of Landmark AI Copyright Debate
India-West News Desk
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria is at the center of a closely watched legal clash between Meta Platforms and a group of authors, as arguments were presented on May 1 regarding a pivotal copyright question related to AI training.
The initial court hearing saw Judge Chhabria examine Meta’s request for a pretrial ruling declaring its training of the Llama large language model, which involved books by writers such as Junot Diaz and comedian Sarah Silverman, as “fair use.” This fair use issue is a critical point in ongoing lawsuits from authors, news outlets, and other copyright holders against companies like Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic, reported Reuters. The fair use doctrine permits the use of copyrighted works under specific conditions without the owner’s consent.
The authors initiated their lawsuit against Meta in 2023, saying the company employed unauthorized copies of their books to train Llama without seeking permission or providing compensation.
Technology companies have told Judge Chhabria and the court that obligating them to compensate copyright holders for training data could severely impede the burgeoning multi-billion dollar AI industry. They argue their AI systems engage in fair use by studying copyrighted material to learn and subsequently create new, transformative content. The authors involved in the case, however, contend that AI companies are illegally copying their work to generate competing content that threatens their livelihoods.
Meta informed Judge Chhabria in March that its use of the authors’ material was transformative, allowing Llama to learn to “serve as a personal tutor on nearly any subject, assist with creative ideation, and help users to generate business reports, translate conversations, analyze data, write code, and compose poems or letters to friends.” Meta stated, “What it does not do is replicate Plaintiffs’ books or substitute for reading them.”
In their filing to Judge Chhabria, the authors, asserted, Reuters reported, that Meta used their books “for their expressive content — the very subject matter copyright law protects.” They argued, “Under a straightforward application of existing copyright law, Meta is liable for massive copyright infringement.”
