{"id":414021,"date":"2026-05-06T05:27:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T05:27:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/414021\/"},"modified":"2026-05-06T05:27:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T05:27:13","slug":"zuckerberg-personally-okd-ai-copyright-infringement-publishers-allege","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/414021\/","title":{"rendered":"Zuckerberg ‘personally’ OK’d AI copyright infringement, publishers allege"},"content":{"rendered":"

Five publishing houses and author Scott Turow have sued Meta and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, alleging the company illegally used millions of copyrighted works to train its AI language system Llama.<\/p>\n

The class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, accuses the tech giant of copyright infringement and opens up a new front in the ongoing battle between the book community and developers of AI.<\/p>\n

The plaintiffs allege that Zuckerberg and Meta \u201cfollowed their well-known motto \u2018move fast and break things\u2019” by illegally drawing upon a massive trove of books and journal articles for Llama.<\/p>\n

\u201cDefendants reproduced and distributed millions of copyrighted works without permission, without providing any compensation to authors or publishers, and with full knowledge that their conduct violated copyright law,\u201d the complaint reads in part. <\/p>\n

\"Mark<\/p>\n

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta (Source: Associated Press)<\/p>\n

\u201cZuckerberg himself personally authorised and actively encouraged the infringement.”<\/p>\n

Authors published by the five companies suing \u2014 Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan and McGraw Hill \u2014 include Turow, James Patterson, Donna Tartt, former President Joe Biden and at least two of the Pulitzer Prize winners announced Monday, Yiyun Li and Amanda Vaill.<\/p>\n

In a statement, Meta vowed to \u201cfight this lawsuit aggressively”<\/p>\n

\u201cAI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use,” the statement reads in part.<\/p>\n

Over the past few years, numerous authors have pursued legal action involving AI. <\/p>\n

\"Antropic's<\/p>\n

Antropic’s “Mythos” has roused concerns. (Source: Getty)<\/p>\n

In 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay US$1.5 billion to settle a class action suit initiated by thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson. <\/p>\n

A final approval hearing is scheduled for next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Five publishing houses and author Scott Turow have sued Meta and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, alleging the company…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":414022,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,64,69,145],"class_list":["post-414021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-north-america","tag-nz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=414021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/414022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=414021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=414021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=414021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}