US District Court judge Vincent Chhabria, who is trying the lawsuit by several authors against Facebook parent Meta Platforms, has allowed the authors’ copyright infringement (DMCA) case to proceed. The plaintiffs allege that Meta stripped copyright information from their works to conceal infringement when Meta used them to train its LLaMA AI platform. The lawsuit also created a class which consists of creators whose content was also used by LLaMA.
A court document said that “The plaintiffs have alleged a sufficient injury for (DMCA) Article III standing. Although ‘the specific right created by the DMCA may be comparatively new,’ Meta’s removal of copyright management information (referred to as ‘CMI’) is an interference with a property right that is closely related to the ‘kind of property-based harms traditionally actionable in copyright.’
CMI was removed intentionally
According to this court order:
“(While) the complaint does not adequately allege that the CMI removal would or did aid infringement by anyone other than Meta … the plaintiffs have adequately alleged that Meta intentionally removed CMI to conceal copyright infringement. The plaintiffs allege that Meta ‘knew that Llama was especially ‘prone’ to memorizing and generating outputs of CMI unless CMI was removed from’ its training data. They also allege that Meta took a number of other steps to reduce the likelihood that Llama would generate outputs that would reveal or indicate that copyrighted material was included in training datasets. Taken together, these allegations raise a ‘reasonable, if not particularly strong, inference’ that Meta removed CMI to try to prevent Llama from outputting CMI and thus revealing that it was trained on copyrighted material.”
Earlier court documents in this case revealed internal Meta emails that said in-house counsel had advised employees to “halt licensing efforts to obtain copyrighted works and instead use pirated works.”
While the Judge allowed the DMCA copyright infringement charge, he dismissed the plaintiffs’ charge that Meta violated California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, because Meta accessed only the data that comprised their works and not their computers.
Further reading
Order granting in part and denying in part motion to dismiss. Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc., Case No. 3:23-cv-03417. Document No. 471, March 07, 2025.. US District Court for the Northern District of California.
Employee statements claim Meta used pirated material to train LLaMA AI in Kadrey case. Article. by Steven Hawley. February 17, 2025. Piracy Monitor
Why it matters
This case is likely to set precedents that will be referenced by other copyright infringement cases, such as The New York Times vs OpenAI et al. If it stands, it will balance the landscape between powerful distribution platform companies that often don’t develop anything original beyond their platforms themselves; and creators that can be individuals that don’t have the resources to marshal a legal defense.
