Determined to probe this key question, Chhabria pushed authors’ attorney, David Boies, to point to specific evidence of market harms that seemed noticeably missing from the record.
“It seems like you’re asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman’s memoir will be affected by the billions of things that Llama will ultimately be capable of producing,” Chhabria said. “And it’s just not obvious to me that that’s the case.”
But if authors can prove fears of market harms are real, Meta might struggle to win over Chhabria, and that could set a precedent impacting copyright cases challenging AI training on other kinds of content.
The judge repeatedly appeared to be sympathetic to authors, suggesting that Meta’s AI training may be a “highly unusual case” where even though “the copying is for a highly transformative purpose, the copying has the high likelihood of leading to the flooding of the markets for the copyrighted works.”
And when Shanmugam argued that copyright law doesn’t shield authors from “protection from competition in the marketplace of ideas,” Chhabria resisted the framing that authors weren’t potentially being robbed, Reuters reported.
“But if I’m going to steal things from the marketplace of ideas in order to develop my own ideas, that’s copyright infringement, right?” Chhabria responded.
Wired noted that he asked Meta’s lawyers, “What about the next Taylor Swift?” If AI made it easy to knock off a young singer’s sound, how could she ever compete if AI produced “a billion pop songs” in her style?
In a statement, Meta’s spokesperson reiterated the company’s defense that AI training is fair use.
“Meta has developed transformational open source AI models that are powering incredible innovation, productivity, and creativity for individuals and companies,” Meta’s spokesperson said. “Fair use of copyrighted materials is vital to this. We disagree with Plaintiffs’ assertions, and the full record tells a different story. We will continue to vigorously defend ourselves and to protect the development of GenAI for the benefit of all.”