The ruling builds upon findings from another federal judge overseeing a lawsuit against AI art generators, who similarly delivered a blow to fundamental contentions from plaintiffs in the case.
A federal judge has dismissed most of Sarah Silverman‘s lawsuit against Meta over the unauthorized use of authors’ copyrighted books to train its generative artificial intelligence model, marking the second ruling from a court siding with AI firms on novel intellectual property questions presented in the legal battle.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria on Monday offered a full-throated denial of one of the authors’ core theories that Meta’s AI system is itself an infringing derivative work made possible only by information extracted from copyrighted material. “This is nonsensical,” he wrote in the order. “There is no way to understand the LLaMA models themselves as a recasting or adaptation of any of the plaintiffs’ books.”
“To prevail on a theory that LLaMA’s outputs constitute derivative infringement, the plaintiffs would indeed need to allege and ultimately prove that the outputs ‘incorporate in some form a portion of’ the plaintiffs’ books,” Chhabria wrote. His reasoning mirrored that of Orrick, who found in the suit against StabilityAI that the “alleged infringer’s derivative work must still bear some similarity to the original work or contain the protected elements of the original work.”
This means that plaintiffs across most cases will have to present evidence of infringing works produced by AI tools that are identical to their copyrighted material. This potentially presents a major issue because they have conceded in some instances that none of the outputs are likely to be a close match to material used in the training data. Under copyright law, a test of substantial similarity is used to assess the degree of similarity to determine whether infringement has occurred.
Other dismissed claims in Chhabria’s order include those over unjust enrichment and violation of competition laws. To the extent they’re based on the surviving claim for copyright infringement, he found that they’re preempted.
Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
In July, Silverman also joined a class action against OpenAI accusing the company of copyright infringement. The case has been consolidated with other suits from authors in federal court.
BY WINSTON CHO
