Meta sued by major book publishers over copyright infringement

A striking development has emerged in artificial intelligence. Tech Close Tech Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Tech AI Close AI Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All AI News Close News Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Follow Follow See All News Meta sued by major book publishers over copyright infringement Macmillan, McGraw-Hill, Cengage, and others claim Meta carried out ‘one of the most massive infringements of copyrighted materials in history. ’ Macmillan, McGraw-Hill, Cengage, and others claim Meta carried out ‘one of the most massive infringements of copyrighted materials in history. ’ by Emma Roth Close Emma Roth News Writer Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

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Follow Follow See All by Emma Roth May 5, 2026, 4:52 PM UTC Link Share Gift Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Emma Roth Close Emma Roth Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Emma Roth is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.

Meta is facing a class action lawsuit filed by five major book publishers and one author over claims the company “engaged in one of the most massive infringements of copyrighted materials in history” when training its Llama AI models, as reported earlier by The New York Times . In their suit , Macmillan, McGraw-Hill, Elsevier, Hachette, Cengage, and author Scott Turow allege that Meta “repeatedly copied” their books and journal articles without permission. The lawsuit accuses Meta of knowingly ripping copyrighted work from “notorious pirate sites,” such as LibGen, Anna’s Archive, Sci-Hub, Sci-Mag, and others, and then feeding that material into its AI model.

It also claims that Meta trained Llama with information inside the Common Crawl dataset, which is allegedly “full of unauthorized copies of copyrighted works. ” As a result, Llama “outputs verbatim and near-verbatim substitutes” of copyrighted material: For example, when prompted with two brief sentences from Cengage’s best-selling textbook, Calculus: Early Transcendentals, 9th edition, by James Stewart, Llama begins reproducing word-for-word the continuation of the section. Several authors have already sued Meta for alleged copyright infringement, which brought to light the company’s internal discussions about how to handle “media coverage suggesting we have used a dataset we know to be pirated.

” Last year, a federal judge ruled in favor of Meta in one of these lawsuits, though he pointed out that his ruling “does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful. ” Related Did AI companies win a fight with authors?

This advance offers important signals about the future of the sector, and the tech world is watching closely.