San Francisco, CA – The Joseph Saveri Law Firm, LLP—a leading class action firm with offices in California and New York—announced today that it, Matthew Butterick, and co-counsel are now partnering with Boies Schiller Flexner (BSF) in their continuing prosecution of the lawsuit against Meta Platforms, Inc. (Meta). The lawsuit, filed in 2023 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges Meta infringed on the copyrights of a class of book authors by using their works to train its generative artificial intelligence Large Language Models (LLMs).
“We welcome BSF to the team. We look forward to joining our collective expertise and experience to continue to prosecute this novel, important case to a successful conclusion. This case represents a significant chapter in the larger fight for preserving ownership rights for all artists and other creators,” said Joseph Saveri, founder of the Joseph Saveri Law Firm.
“BSF has been involved in many significant legal battles over the intellectual property rights involved in cutting-edge technology, including generative AI, and we collectively believe this case will establish critical guidance for the use of generative AI. We look forward to partnering with Joseph Saveri, Matthew Butterick, and co-counsel to litigate this precedent-setting matter,” concurred Maxwell Pritt, the head of BSF’s California offices.
The plaintiffs, including best-selling authors such as Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others, allege that Meta has copied their copyrighted books without consent to build and improve its AI systems. The lawsuit alleges that Meta used datasets containing copyrighted materials from "shadow libraries" such as Bibliotik, which host pirated content. Meta’s AI models were trained on these datasets, without the permission of the copyright holders, allowing Meta to exploit copyrighted works for commercial gain and for the purposes of displacing and damaging copyright holders.
The lawsuit—Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 23-cv-03417-VC—asserts claims under the federal Copyright Act. On behalf of a similarly situated class of writers and other copyright holders, it seeks damages for the authors and an injunction to prevent Meta from further infringing on their copyrights without consent, credit, compensation, or transparency. It will have significant implications for the future of AI development, particularly in how companies source training data for machine learning and generative artificial intelligence products and systems.
For more information, please see our case page, https://www.saverilawfirm.com/meta language-model-litigation, and our case website, https://llmlitigation.com/.