Zuckerberg "Personally Approved and Actively Encouraged" Meta's Copyright Infringement

Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier, Cengage and author Scott Turow have filed a lawsuit against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs allege that Meta illegally copied millions of books, papers, articles, and other works to use for AI training, specifically for training Llama.

According to the complaint, Meta downloaded materials via torrent from the notorious piracy site LibGen and unauthorized web scrapes, and Zuckerberg personally approved and actively encouraged this process. The plaintiffs also state that when Meta was reviewing a licensing strategy, it was halted on Zuckerberg's orders, and that internal memos referred to LibGen as "a dataset we know is pirated" while stating an intention not to disclose its use.

The plaintiffs argue that Meta stripped copyright management information to conceal the source, approved and directed the use of more than 267TB of pirated material, and generated outputs based on it that could substitute for the original works. The claims include unspecified monetary damages.

Meta is expected to defend itself based on prior case law suggesting that AI training can constitute fair use. Notably, in June 2025, a similar claim brought by 13 authors was dismissed, with the court at the time finding that Meta's training of Llama constituted fair use.