In Kadrey vs. Meta, authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates have alleged that Meta has violated their intellectual property rights by using their books to train its Llama AI models, and that the company removed the copyright information from their books to hide the alleged infringement.

In Friday’s ruling, Chhabria wrote that the allegation of copyright infringement is “obviously a concrete injury sufficient for standing” and that the authors have also “adequately alleged that Meta intentionally removed CMI [copyright management information] to conceal copyright infringement.”

“Taken together, these allegations raise a ‘reasonable, if not particularly strong inference’ that Meta removed CMI to try to prevent Llama from outputting CMI and thus revealing it was trained on copyrighted material,” Chhabria wrote.

The judge did, however, dismiss the authors’ claims related to the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA), because they did not “allege that Meta accessed their computers or servers — only their data (in the form of their books).”

If I’ve understood it correctly, this isn’t a lawsuit over the recent discovery of Meta downloading terabytes of books from Libgen?

The lawsuit would be a small blow to Meta but an absolutely massive one to open source. Google, Meta and Microsoft are essentially the only companies that can actually afford to pay for this data.

It’s these lawsuits that will pave the way towards a soft monopoly with a limited choice of censored models all behind pricey subscription services.