Scott Turow and Five Publishers Sue Meta Over AI Training Data

Scott Turow, the bestselling author of “Presumed Innocent,” has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta. And he’s brought along half of the publishing industry.

Turow and his company S.C.R.I.B.E. joined forces with Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage to file a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs allege Meta built its Llama language model by copying millions of copyrighted books and journal articles, with direct authorization from CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The complaint claims Meta “briefly considered licensing deals with major publishers” but reversed course in April 2023 after the question was escalated to Zuckerberg. A Meta employee is quoted in the filing as saying: “If we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into the fair use strategy.”

The lawsuit cites specific works including Turow’s “Presumed Innocent,” Douglas Preston’s “Impact,” Peter Brown’s “The Wild Robot,” N.K. Jemisin’s “The Fifth Season,” and Lemony Snicket’s “Who Could That Be at This Hour?” The class could include authors with registered copyrights on books with ISBNs or journal articles with DOIs or ISSNs.

“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,” Turow said 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.”

Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger called it “the most flagrant copyright breach in history.” The plaintiffs are seeking statutory damages, a permanent injunction, and an order requiring Meta to destroy all infringing copies.

Meta pushed back sharply. “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 Meta public affairs director. “We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”

The case enters a complicated legal landscape. A federal judge dismissed a different group of authors’ copyright claims against Meta last June, finding the plaintiffs didn’t present enough evidence of harm. But Anthropic settled with publishers for $1.5 billion last September after a ruling that the company had copied millions of books without consent or compensation.

Whether Turow’s case can distinguish itself from Meta’s previous win — and overcome the “fair use” defense — will be the central question.