Complaint: ELSEVIER INC., CENGAGE LEARNING, INC., HACHETTE BOOK GROUP, INC., MACMILLAN PUBLISHING GROUP, LLC D/B/A MACMILLAN PUBLISHERS, MCGRAW HILL LLC, SCOTT TUROW, and S.C.R.I.B.E., INC., individually and on behalf of others similarly situated,
Plaintiffs,
v.
META PLATFORMS, INC. and MARK ZUCKERBERG,
Defendants.
Alexandra Alter , The New York Times; Five Publishers and Scott Turow Sue Meta and Mark Zuckerberg
The class-action lawsuit accuses the tech giant and its founder and chief executive of infringing on authors’ copyrights.
"Five major publishers — Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage — and the best-selling novelist Scott Turow have filed a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta and its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.
The complaint, which was filed on Tuesday morning in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses Meta and Zuckerberg of illegally using millions of copyrighted works to train their artificial intelligence program Llama, and of removing copyright notices and other copyright management information from those works.
The lawsuit asserts that Meta’s engineers relied on pirated books and journal articles to train the program by downloading unlicensed copies through websites like Anna’s Archive, an open source search engine for piracy sites including LibGen and Sci-Hub. The suit also claims that “Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement.”"
Jim Milliot , Publishers Weekly; Publishers Strike Back Against Google in Infringement Suit
"The Association of American Publishers continued its fight this week to allow two of its members, Hachette Book Group and Cengage, to join a class action copyright infringement lawsuit against Google and its generative AI product Gemini. The lawsuit was first brought by a group of illustrators and writers in 2023.
In mid-January the AAP filed its first motion to allow the two publishers to take part in the lawsuit that is now before Judge Eumi K. Lee in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Earlier this week the AAP filed its reply to Google’s motion asking the court to block AAP’s request.
At the core of Google’s argument is the notion that the publishers should have asked to intervene sooner, as well as the assertion that publishers have no interest in the case because they don’t own authors works.
In its response, AAP argues that it was only when the case reached class certification that the publishers’ interests became clear. The new filing also rebuts Google’s other claim that publishers’ don’t own any rights.
“Google’s professed misunderstanding of ownership exemplifies exactly the kind of value that Proposed Intervenors bring to the case,” the AAP stated, arguing that both HBG and Cengage own certain rights to the works in question and that “scores” of other publishers will be impacted by the litigation."
