Law professors side with authors battling in Meta AI copyright lawsuit— and the debate over whether tech giants can freely scrape copyrighted content to train artificial intelligence models is heating up in U.S. courts.

In a significant legal development, a collective of respected copyright law professors filed an amicus brief this past Friday, siding with authors who have accused Meta of unlawfully using their e-books to train its Llama AI models without proper authorization. The case, officially known as Kadrey vs Meta, has rapidly become a focal point in the broader debate over intellectual property rights in the age of generative AI.

The professors, submitting their views to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, argued that Meta’s legal defense hinges on a dangerously expansive interpretation of “fair use” — one that, if accepted, could set a precedent with wide-reaching implications for authors, artists, and content creators worldwide.

Their brief was blunt in its critique, labeling Meta’s position “a breathtaking request for greater legal privileges than courts have ever granted human authors.” According to the filing, using copyrighted books for AI model training does not meet the legal threshold of “transformative” use — a central pillar of the fair use doctrine. The professors argued that the process of training an AI on copyrighted works is functionally no different from using those works to educate human writers, a purpose the original authors intended from the start.

Moreover, the brief highlighted an additional concern: the trained AI models are likely to produce outputs that could compete directly with the original copyrighted works in the same market, thereby causing economic harm to the authors.

Academic and Industry Groups Rally Behind Authors

The law professors were not the only ones stepping into the courtroom fray. On the same day, the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM) also submitted its own amicus brief supporting the authors’ claims, raising alarms over the unchecked use of protected content for commercial AI model training.

Further adding to the weight of the argument, the Copyright Alliance — a nonprofit organization representing creators from a broad spectrum of disciplines — and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) also submitted their own statements in favor of the authors, underlining the wide concern across creative and academic industries.

The involvement of these heavyweight institutions signals growing discomfort with the way large language models are often trained on massive datasets scraped from the internet, frequently without the knowledge or consent of the original creators.

Meta’s Defense: Backed by Tech Allies

Shortly after the filing of these briefs, a Meta spokesperson directed media attention to another set of amicus briefs — this time backing Meta’s legal arguments. Filed earlier last week, these included submissions from a smaller group of law professors and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit known for its advocacy of digital rights and open access to information.

Meta’s core argument rests on the assertion that the company’s AI model training practices fall squarely under fair use protections and that the lawsuit lacks legal standing. The tech giant has sought to dismiss the case, contending that the authors have not suffered direct damages.

Judge Greenlights Core of the Case to Proceed

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria rejected Meta’s initial bid to fully dismiss the lawsuit, ruling that the authors had provided sufficient allegations to establish standing. In his written opinion, Judge Chhabria described the claims of copyright infringement as “obviously a concrete injury” and accepted the argument that Meta allegedly removed copyright management information (CMI) to obscure the infringement.

Although the court dismissed some parts of the case, the core issue — whether Meta’s use of the authors’ works for AI training constitutes copyright infringement — will proceed, keeping both the tech industry and creative communities on edge.

A Landmark Moment for AI and Copyright Law

The case is just one of several high-profile lawsuits that challenge the ways artificial intelligence companies gather training data. Another major suit involves The New York Times suing OpenAI, while other creative groups are also pursuing similar cases against various AI developers.

As the legal battle intensifies, one thing is clear: Law professors side with authors battling in the Meta AI copyright lawsuit at a moment when courts are being asked to define the future boundaries of fair use in a world increasingly dominated by generative AI.

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