Five Publishers and Scott Turow Sue Meta and Mark Zuckerberg
Five major publishers (Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage) and best-selling novelist Scott Turow have filed a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta and its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
complaintThe lawsuit, filed Tuesday morning in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses Meta and Zuckerberg of illegally using millions of copyrighted works to train their artificial intelligence program, Lama, and of removing copyright notices and other copyright management information from those works.
The lawsuit alleges that Meta engineers relied on pirated books and magazine articles to train the program by downloading unlicensed copies through websites such as Anna’s Archive, an open-source search engine for pirated sites such as LibGen and Sci-Hub. The lawsuit also alleges that “Zuckerberg personally authorized and actively encouraged the violation.”
Meta representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Plaintiffs argue that Meta’s AI program poses a threat to the livelihoods of authors and publishers because the technology can be used to quickly produce knockoff books created by AI, outlining the plots and themes of copyrighted books in such detail that readers do not need to purchase them.
“These AI-generated books are already flooding Amazon, the world’s largest book marketplace, with volumes that materially displace human-written works,” the complaint states. The filing names several authors whose works plaintiffs allege were used to educate Lama, including VE Schwab, NK Jemisin, Lemony Snicket, and Turow.
Some of the evidence cited in the complaint allegedly came directly from Lama. When asked to create a travel guide in the style of author Becky Lomax, Llama quickly produced “a convincing rendition of Lomax’s native inner voice,” the complaint states. Later, when asked how he was able to reproduce Lomax’s style so accurately, Llama allegedly replied: “While I have no personal interaction with Becky Lomax, I have trained on a vast amount of textual data, including her published works.”
Lama can also summarize books in detail. When asked to provide a synopsis of Turow’s book “Presumed Innocent,” Llama confirmed that he had “trained on the digital version of the book, allowing me to access and analyze its content,” according to the complaint.
In an email to The Times, Turow said Meta’s use of pirated works amounted to “shameless, damaging and unfair conduct.”
“I find it saddening and infuriating that one of the 10 richest companies in the world knowingly uses pirated copies of my books and thousands of other authors to educate Lama, who can and has produced competing material, including works purportedly in my style,” Turow wrote.
The plaintiffs argue that Meta’s AI program could “dilute the overall market for literary works” by producing “imitations and parodies” of authors’ works.
“These printouts are sufficiently similar to copyrighted works in terms of plot, plot details, sequence of events, character names and characteristics, or other creative choices that they replace the original work for many readers or consumers,” the complaint states.
The lawsuit is the latest effort by authors and publishers to rein in tech companies’ use of copyrighted works to train large language models.
There are writers lawsuits were filed OpenAI versus tech companies like Anthropic Google and xAI Due to unauthorized use of companies’ work. Last fall, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to authors whose books were used to train its artificial intelligence program.
(The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, as well as Perplexity, accusing the companies of copyright infringement of news content related to artificial intelligence systems. The companies refuted the allegations.)
The authors had previously challenged Meta in court. A judge in June 2025 The decision was made in favor of MetaIt found that the plaintiffs had failed to present sufficient evidence that Meta’s AI product would cause “market dilution” by producing a flood of AI-generated books.
The lawsuit filed against Meta on Tuesday brought together trade and educational publishers, academic publishers of scientific and medical journals, and best-selling legal thriller authors. The plaintiffs are seeking an order requiring Meta to destroy all illegally obtained copies of plaintiffs’ copyrighted works used in AI training and to “cease all unlawful activity,” as well as seeking “further relief as the Court deems appropriate.”
“We are focused on a much more sustainable AI environment—one that is transparent, fair, and participatory, and that prevents harm to authors and publishers,” said Maria A. Pallante, president and chief executive of the Association of American Publishers, a trade group that acts as a legal and policy advocate for the book publishing industry. “The damage is already obvious.”
