The Battle of Copyright of Meta with a group of authors, including Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, will excite the question of whether the company’s tools of the company produce works that can cannibalize the sales of authors’ books.
The judge of the American district court, Vince Chhabria, spent several hours to grill lawyers on both sides after having each filed requests in partial summary judgment, which means that they want the Chhabria to decide on specific questions of the case rather than leaving everyone to be decided at the trial. The authors allege that metaly used their work illegally to build its generative AI tools, stressing that society has hacked its books through “shadow libraries” like Libgen. The social media giant does not deny that he has used work or that he has downloaded books from mass Shadow libraries, but insists on the fact that his behavior is protected by the doctrine of “fair use”, an exception in American law on copyright law which allows use without authorization of work protected by copyright in certain cases, including parody, teaching and reports.
If Chhabria grants a motion, he will make a decision before the case is judged – and probably established an important precedent shaping how the courts deal with affairs generating copyright of the AI to move forward. Kadrey v. Meta is one of the dozens of prosecution against AI companies which are wound by the American legal system.
While the authors were strongly concentrated on the piracy element of the case, Chhabria spoke strongly about her conviction that the big question is whether Meta’s IA tools will harm books and will cause the authors to lose money. “If you change spectacularly, you could even say obliterate, the labor market of this person, and you say that you do not even have to pay a license to this person to use their work to create the product that destroys the work market-I simply do not understand how it can be fair use,” he told Meta Lawyer Kannon. (Shanmugam replied that the suggested effect was “only speculation”))
Chhabria and Shanmugam continued to struggle if Taylor Swift would be injured if his music was introduced into an AI tool which then created billions of robotic lips. Chhabria wondered how it would have an impact on less established songwriters. “And the next Taylor Swift?” He asked, arguing that a “relatively unknown artist” whose work was ingested by Meta would probably have their career embarrassed if the model produced “a billions of pop songs” in their style.
Sometimes it seemed that the case was the authors to lose, with Chhabria noting that Meta was “intended to fail” if the complainants could prove that Meta’s tools created similar works that had cracked how much money they could earn their work. But Chhabria also stressed that he was not convinced that the authors could show the necessary evidence. When he turned to the authors’ legal team, led by the high -level prosecutor, David Boies, Chhabria asked several times if the complainants could really justify accusations that Meta’s IA tools were likely to harm their commercial prospects. “It seems that you ask me to speculate that the Memoirs market of Sarah Silverman will be affected,” he told Boies. “It is not easy for me that this is the case.”
