Vince Chhabria noted that AI was "dramatically changing" the market for authors
San Francisco-based US District Judge Vince Chhabria has questioned Meta Platform’s fair use argument in a case brought against the company for its use of copyrighted material without permission to train large language model Llama, reported Reuters.
The suit was initially filed in 2023 by comedian Sarah Silverman and authors Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden. The suit alleged that Meta trained Llama on pirated copies of their work without seeking permission or providing compensation in the process of creating content that competes with the authors’ works.
Meta countered that its application of the works fell under “fair use,” saying that AI systems merely learn to generate new content from provided material. During the court proceeding held on Thursday, Meta attorney Kannon Shanmugam said in a statement published by Reuters that copyright owners were not entitled to “protection from competition in the marketplace of ideas.”
However, in a statement published by Reuters, Chhabria responded with, “but if I'm going to steal things from the marketplace of ideas in order to develop my own ideas, that's copyright infringement, right?”
The judge pointed out that companies were “using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products.” Chhabria told Meta’s attorneys that he could not grasp how this could be considered “fair use.”
“You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person's work, and you're saying that you don't even have to pay a license to that person,” he said in a statement published by Reuters.
Chhabria said that Meta’s use of the copyrighted works was transformative but may not have been fair.
“This seems like a highly unusual case in the sense that though the copying is for a highly transformative purpose, the copying has the high likelihood of leading to the flooding of the markets for the copyrighted works,” he said in a statement published by Reuters.
Chhabria also pointed out that the suit may not have tackled the possible market effect of Llama’s outputs enough.
“I think it is taken away by fair use unless a plaintiff can show that the market for their actual copyrighted work is going to be dramatically affected,” he told David Boies, representing the plaintiffs, in a statement published by Reuters. “It seems like you're asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman's memoir will be affected by the billions of things that Llama will ultimately be capable of producing. And it's just not obvious to me that that's the case.”
Chhabria’s ruling on the matter will address what Reuters described as a “key question” for the AI market.
