Publishing houses Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage joined forces with bestselling author Scott Turow (and his own company S.C.R.I.B.E) to file a class-action lawsuit on Tuesday against Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. The plaintiffs accuse the tech company of building generative AI models on the backs of millions of stolen copyrighted books and journal articles.
In their complaint filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, the plaintiffs argue Meta knowingly copied copyrighted materials from notorious pirate websites such as LibGen and Anna's Archive to train various iterations of its Llama language model — with Zuckerberg's personal authorization to do so. The complaint alleges that Meta willfully bypassed legal licensing markets to gain an advantage in the "AI arms race."
"All Americans should understand that the bold future promised by A.I., has been, to paraphrase the investigative writer Alex Reisner, created with stolen words," said Turow in a statement to NPR. "It is all the more shameful that these violations of the law were undertaken by one of the richest corporations in the world."
According to the complaint, Meta "briefly considered licensing deals with major publishers" but changed its strategy in April 2023. The question of whether to license or pirate moving forward was "escalated" to Zuckerberg, after which, the complaint alleges, Meta's business development team received verbal instructions to stop licensing efforts. "If we license once [sic] single book, we won't be able to lean into the fair use strategy," a Meta employee is quoted as saying in the complaint.
"It's the most flagrant copyright breach in history," said Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger in a statement to NPR. "And these voracious tech companies need to be held accountable."
The lawsuit cites numerous specific works allegedly stolen by Meta to feed Llama. Turow alleges Meta infringed several of his well-known books, including the 1987 legal thriller Presumed Innocent. Other cited works include Douglas Preston's Impact, Peter Brown's The Wild Robot, The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin, and Lemony Snicket's Who Could That Be at This Hour? The list also includes research and academic titles.
The class represented by Turow could potentially include many authors, according to the complaint — "all legal or beneficial owners of registered copyrights, in whole or in part, for any book possessing an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) or journal article possessing a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) or International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)." Some books do not have ISBN numbers, but most do.
The plaintiffs are seeking statutory damages, a permanent injunction against Meta to stop further use of their works, and an order requiring the tech giant to destroy all infringing copies of copyrighted materials.
Meta is hitting back against the literary world's allegations.
"AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use," said Nkechi Nneji, a public affairs director for Meta, in a statement to NPR. "We will fight this lawsuit aggressively."
Authors and publishers have brought dozens of lawsuits against AI companies in recent years, many of which are still pending. Anthropic ended up paying a $1.5 billion settlement to authors in September 2025 to resolve a lawsuit brought by a group of literary plaintiffs.
This came after U.S. District Court judge William Alsup had supported Anthropic's argument that the company's use of copyrighted books to train their AI model was acceptable. "The use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative," Alsup said last June. (The settlement occurred as a result of the judge later ruling that Anthropic's use of millions of pirated books to build its models copied without obtaining the authors' consent or giving them compensation was not OK.)
However, other cases could be used in support of tech companies' "fair use" defense.
For example, last June, a federal judge dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit from a different group of authors who accused Meta of stealing their works to train its models. "The Court has no choice but to grant summary judgment to Meta on the plaintiffs' claim that the company violated copyright law by training its models with their books," said U.S. District Court judge Vince Chhabria, finding that the plaintiffs did not present enough evidence to make the case that Meta's use of their copyrighted works was harmful.
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