Meta scored a major win in court Wednesday. A federal judge ruled Meta’s use of copyrighted books to train its AI falls under “fair use.” The move came in a lawsuit from 13 authors, including Sarah Silverman, who accused Meta of illegal AI training.
Judge Vince Chhabria handed down a summary judgment without a jury — clearing Meta by saying its AI training was “transformative” and didn’t just copy the original books.
Chhabria also said the plaintiffs couldn’t prove Meta harmed their market value, a key copyright factor. 
“This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,” Judge Chhabria said.
“In cases involving uses like Meta’s, it seems like the plaintiffs will often win, at least where those cases have better-developed records on the market effects of the defendant’s use.”
“The plaintiffs presented no meaningful evidence on market dilution at all,” said Judge Chhabria.
This follows a recent legal win for Anthropic in a similar AI training case. Both rulings favor Big Tech but are narrowly focused, not blanket approvals.
Other lawsuits targeting AI training on copyrighted material are still active. The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over news article training. Disney and Universal are suing Midjourney for using films and TV shows.
Chhabria flagged that fair use depends on the work type. News articles, for example, might be more vulnerable to AI’s impact than books.
The fight over AI training and copyright is far from over. But for now, Meta dodged a big copyright bullet.
