Major publishers sue Meta over Llama training
macmillan, mcgraw-hill, cengage, elsevier, and hachette filed a class action lawsuit against meta, alleging the company illegally pirated books from libgen and anna’s archive to train its llama models. the complaint claims llama outputs verbatim text from copyrighted textbooks like stewart’s calculus. meta disputes the claims, citing fair use, and vows to fight the lawsuit aggressively.
Five major publishers—Macmillan, McGraw-Hill, Cengage, Elsevier, and Hachette—alongside author Scott Turow, filed a class action lawsuit against Meta in federal court. The complaint alleges Meta engaged in systematic copyright infringement by training its Llama models on pirated content sourced from sites like LibGen, Anna's Archive, and Sci-Hub. The publishers cite internal company communications and claim Llama can reproduce verbatim passages from protected works, such as Cengage's *Calculus: Early Transcendentals*.
The plaintiffs seek damages and an injunction to halt Meta's use of their copyrighted materials, alongside a court order requiring Meta to disclose the specific datasets used for training. Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold defended the company's practices, stating courts have found AI training on copyrighted material qualifies as fair use, and confirmed Meta intends to fight the lawsuit aggressively.