Back to today’s briefing

Story perspectives

Publishers and Turow Sue Meta Over Llama Training

5/5/2026

31 7 Full Breakdown

Summary

Story summary

Five publishers and Scott Turow sued Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in New York, claiming the firm used copyrighted material to train Llama AI.
The complaint says Meta stripped copyright data from scraped works, copied books and articles from sites, and halted a $200 million licensing effort after Zuckerberg directed a fair-use strategy.
Meta will fight and maintains that courts have found AI training on copyrighted material can be fair use.

History

Historical Context

The Authors Guild sued Google in 2005 over its Book Search project, which scanned copyrighted books without permission. In October 2015 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled the scanning was fair use, a decision that followed a rejected $125 million settlement. That precedent now frames publishers’ and authors’ challenges to AI developers like Meta over large-scale text mining.

1 of 2

Story summary

Five publishers and Scott Turow sued Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in New York, claiming the firm used copyrighted material to train Llama AI.
The complaint says Meta stripped copyright data from scraped works, copied books and articles from sites, and halted a $200 million licensing effort after Zuckerberg directed a fair-use strategy.
Meta will fight and maintains that courts have found AI training on copyrighted material can be fair use.

1 / 2