Meta Platforms, Inc. is facing a major escalation in its legal battles over artificial intelligence.
A new class-action lawsuit was filed in the Southern District of New York, and several writers have come together alleging unauthorized use of copyrighted books.
This legal action comes just months after New Mexico won a landmark case against the social media giant, with the jury finding Meta liable for endangering children and misleading consumers about the safety of its platforms, and imposing a $375 million civil penalty.
Case of copyright infringement
In the age of artificial intelligence, maintaining intellectual property is becoming increasingly difficult. In the past few years, several writers and news companies have sued AI stalwarts like Meta and OpenAI for copyright infringement and for the unethical use of their content to train AI models.
And this recent, high-profile case is against Meta, which is already embroiled in several AI-related controversies, from 8,000 job cuts to save money on AI infrastructure to being sued by Santa Clara County for misleading advertising.
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The new litigation represents a historical alliance between the world’s largest publishers, including Elsevier, Hachette, and Macmillan, and acclaimed authors like Scott Turrow to challenge what they describe as “greedy and irresponsible” corporate deployment of AI.
The lawsuit, filed on May 5, is led by best-selling author Scott Turow and includes plaintiffs Elsevier, Cengage Learning, Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw-Hill, and S.C.R.I.B.E. against defendants Meta Platforms and Mark Zuckerberg.
The core of the case is that authors and publishers spend years and millions of dollars creating high-quality books. But Meta took that hard work for free to build a product that could eventually replace human writers.
The lawsuit points to three main ways Meta allegedly broke the law:
- Using pirate sites: instead of buying books and paying for licenses, the lawsuit alleges that Meta “illegally torrented” millions of copyrighted books.
- Direct infringement: Meta copies these works multiple times over into computer memory to train various iterations of its Llama model.
- CMI: Intentionally removed Copyright Management Information (CMI) to “conceal its training sources and facilitate their unauthorized use.”
A notable aspect of this filing is the naming of Mark Zuckerberg as a defendant. The complaint alleges that Zuckerberg personally authorized the infringement, claiming that while Meta initially considered licensing deals, on Zuckerberg’s “personal instruction”, it abandoned negotiations and “stole the works instead,” notes the complaint.
“The path was more expedient for Meta, but it deprived publishers and authors of fair compensation and spurned established licensing markets,” the lawsuit alleges.
Broader AI litigation universe
This is not an isolated case. Over the years, Meta has faced several copyright-related challenges worldwide.
In the US, comedian Sarah Silverman and authors Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden previously filed suit against both Meta and OpenAI for similar infringements involving training data, which was later dismissed in 2025.
Prominent British authors, including Kazuo Ishiguro and Kate Mosse, petitioned the UK government in 2025 to hold Meta executives responsible for using pirated works.
Earlier in March, thousands of these authors participated in a “blank book” protest, publishing empty books with only their names to highlight the threat that generative AI poses to human creativity and copyright, reported by The Guardian.
And today, on May 11, California’s Santa Clara County sued Meta for misleading advertising and false business practices on its Facebook and Instagram ads. The lawsuit claimed that Meta’s AI system often helped “unethical markets in creating ads for scams,” according to Reuters.
Despite complaints about AI in the background, Meta is continuing to increase its AI Capital Expenditures, anticipating 2026 Capital Expenditures of $125-145 billion, up from its previous range of $115-135 billion, as noted in its Q1 2026 earnings call.
The economic stakes
The publishers in the copyright infringement lawsuit argue that Meta is free-riding on their investments.
“That conduct appropriates the economic value of the works, eliminates a legitimate licensing market, and allows Defendants to free-ride on investments they did not make,” notes the complaint.
Further adding that copyright laws were made to prevent these types of harm.
Plaintiffs, in their complaint, added that Meta predicted it could generate between $460 billion and $1.4 trillion in revenue from AI products by 2035. This wealth, they argue, is being created on the backs of creators who have not been compensated.
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