Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has secured judicial backing in a copyright lawsuit initiated by a collective of authors this week, marking a second legal triumph for the American Artificial Intelligence Industry.

Prominent authors, including Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, claimed that the owners of Facebook utilized their books without authorization to train AI systems, thereby violating copyright laws.

This ruling comes on the heels of a decision affirming that another major AI player, Humanity, did not infringe upon the authors’ copyrights.

In his ruling on the Meta case, US District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco stated that the authors failed to present adequate evidence that the AI developed by tech companies would harm the market to establish an illegal infringement under US copyright law.

However, the judgment offered some encouragement to American creators who contended that training AI models without consent was unlawful.

Chhabria noted that using copyrighted material without permission for AI training is illegal in “many situations,” contrasting with another federal judge in San Francisco who recently concluded in a separate case that Humanity’s AI training constituted “fair use” of copyrighted works.

The fair use doctrine permits the utilization of copyrighted works under certain conditions without the copyright holder’s permission, which serves as a vital defense for high-tech firms.

“This ruling does not imply that Meta employs copyrighted content to train language models,” Chhabria remarked. “It merely indicates that these plaintiffs presented an incorrect argument and failed to establish a supportive record for their case.”

Humanity is also set to face further legal scrutiny this year after a judge determined that it had illegally utilized over 7 million books from the Central Library, infringing on the authors’ copyrights without fair use.

A representative for Boys Schiller Flexner, the law firm representing the authors against Meta, expressed disagreement with the judge’s ruling to favor Meta despite the “uncontroversial record” of the company’s “historically unprecedented copyright infringement.”

A spokesperson for Meta stated that the company valued the decision and characterized fair use as a “critical legal framework” for developing “transformative” AI technology.

In 2023, the authors filed a lawsuit against Meta, asserting that the company exploited unauthorized versions of their books to train the AI systems known as Llamas without consent or remuneration.

Copyright disputes are placing AI firms in opposition to publishers and creative sectors on both sides of the Atlantic. This tension arises because generative AI models, which form the foundation of powerful tools like ChatGPT chatbots, require extensive datasets to be trained, much of which is comprised of copyrighted material.

This lawsuit is part of a series of copyright cases filed by authors, media organizations, and other copyright holders against OpenAI, Microsoft, and companies like Humanity regarding AI training.

AI enterprises claim they are fairly using copyrighted materials to develop systems that create new and innovative content, while asserting that imposing copyright fees on them could threaten the burgeoning AI sector.

Copyright holders maintain that AI firms are unlawfully replicating their works and generating rival content that jeopardizes their livelihoods. Chhabria conveyed empathy toward this argument during the May hearing, reiterating it on Wednesday.

The judge remarked that generative AI could inundate the market with endless images, songs, articles, and books, requiring only a fraction of the time and creativity involved in traditional creation.

“Consequently, by training generative AI models with copyrighted works, companies frequently produce outputs that significantly undermine the market for those original works, thereby greatly diminishing the incentives for humans to create in the conventional manner,” stated Chhabria.