Sarah Silverman Hits Stumbling Block in AI Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Against Meta

Winston Cho writes via The Hollywood Reporter: A federal judge has dismissed most of Sarah Silverman's lawsuit against Meta over the unauthorized use of authors' copyrighted books to train its generative artificial intelligence model, marking the second ruling from a court siding with AI firms on novel intellectual property questions presented in the legal battle. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria on Monday offered a full-throated denial of one of the authors' core theories that Meta's AI system is itself an infringing derivative work made possible only by information extracted from copyrighted material. 'This is nonsensical,' he wrote in the order. 'There is no way to understand the LLaMA models themselves as a recasting or adaptation of any of the plaintiffs' books.'

Another of Silverman's arguments that every result produced by Meta's AI tools constitutes copyright infringement was dismissed because she didn't offer evidence that any of the outputs 'could be understood as recasting, transforming, or adapting the plaintiffs' books.' Chhabria gave her lawyers a chance to replead the claim, along with five others that weren't allowed to advance. Notably, Meta didn't move to dismiss the allegation that the copying of books for purposes of training its AI model rises to the level of copyright infringement. In July, Silverman and two authors filed a class action lawsuit against Meta and OpenAI for allegedly using their content without permission to train AI language models.

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