Meta wins AI copyright lawsuit—but fair use boundaries remain uncertain
26 Jun 2025

A US District Court judge has dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta, the parent company of Facebook.

The case was filed by a group of 13 authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman and writers Jacqueline Woodson and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

They had accused Meta of illegally using their works to train its artificial intelligence technology.

This judgment follows a similar outcome in favor of Anthropic's Claude model, where a separate court endorsed AI training on legally acquired books as fair use.

'Plaintiffs made the wrong arguments'
Verdict details

US District Judge Vince Chhabria ruled in favor of Meta, saying the authors "made the wrong arguments."

However, he clarified that this doesn't mean Meta's use of copyrighted materials is lawful.

"This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful," Chhabria wrote.

"It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one."

Meta wins, but it could still be in trouble
Company statement

Responding to the court's decision, Meta expressed its appreciation for the ruling.

"Open-source AI models are powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and fair use of copyright material is a vital legal framework for building this transformative technology," the company said in a statement.

Despite winning this case, Meta could still be facing more lawsuits over similar matters as Judge Chhabria hinted at potential future cases from other authors against AI companies like Meta.

Judge says AI companies may be serial copyright infringers
Legal perspective

Chhabria said that AI companies may be serial copyright infringers for training their tech on books and other human-created works.

He dismissed arguments that enforcing decades-old copyright laws would hinder progress of AI.

"These products are expected to generate billions, even trillions of dollars for the companies that are developing them," he said.

"If using copyrighted works to train the models is as necessary as the companies say, they will figure out a way to compensate copyright holders for it."

Other similar cases across industries
Ongoing cases

The cases against Meta and Anthropic for training their AI models on copyrighted books are just two of many.

The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for using news articles, while Disney and Universal are suing Midjourney over films and TV shows.

Judge Chhabria noted that fair use defenses depend heavily on case specifics, with some industries possibly having stronger fair use arguments than others.