Sarah Silverman sues and loses legal battle against Meta - This Week in Tech, Race, and Gender - DINT 158
A U.S. district judge in San Francisco threw out Sarah Silverman's proposed class action lawsuit against Meta claim she and her fellow claimants didn't prove they lost money due to Meta's swiping.
Judge to creators: ‘Come back when you’ve got proof AI swiping hurts your pockets’
It looks like creators have a tough road ahead when it comes to AI systems swiping their content to train the large language models that make up the foundation of the technology.
Meta, which is Facebook’s parent company, won a landmark legal ruling this past week against Sarah Silverman and other authors/creators who sued the company for feeding its LLM, LLaMa with their copyrighted material.
Judge Vince Chhabria, a federal judge out the US District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco, ruled Meta was not right to swipe the materials but the authors didn’t establish that such swiping hurt their bottom line earnings/sales.
That happened on Tuesday, June 25. And on Monday Anthropic, the makers of the Claude chatbot, also won a decisive victory against creators looking for compensation for Anthropic’s use of their copyrighted works.
The judge in that case, William Alsup, ruled that Claude transformed the original works in a way that is acceptable under current copyright law.
These two cases present mixed messages to creators of original works, which include authors, musicians, comedians, and artists of all kinds, of both digital and non-digital work.
Future cases brought by creators may refer to Judge Chhabria’s ruling and point directly to financial threats resulting from what they deem piracy on the part of tech companies running chatbots such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and the like.
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