Judge Meta

Role

Judge

Notable Ruling

Google Antitrust Ruling

Discrepancy Note

The name 'Judge Meta' is not corroborated by general web searches for U.S. District Judges or judges involved in the Google antitrust case. The provided web search results discuss 'U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria' in AI copyright cases involving the company Meta, not a 'Judge Meta' in the Google antitrust context. The described outcome of the Google antitrust ruling (Google winning and avoiding a breakup) also conflicts with widely reported information about the actual Google antitrust case (USA v. Google LLC).

Source of Information

The All-In Podcast (Document 6390e2c5-48e6-4276-972d-f639658baf5e)

Reason for Leniency in Google Ruling

Intense competition from the AI sector, including companies like OpenAI

Outcome of Google Ruling (as per source document)

Google avoided a forced breakup

Undated

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria granted summary judgment to Metain a case brought by 13 authors, including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Sarah Silverman, and Pulitzer Prize winners Junot Díaz and Andrew Sean Greer, who alleged the company illegally used their books to train its Llama AI models. The judge found Meta's use was "highly transformative" under copyright law's fair use doctrine and that the authors failed to present adequate evidence of how they were harmed by Meta's actions. [...] The Meta ruling comes just a day after U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled in Bartz v. Anthropic that while training AI on copyrighted books constituted fair use, downloading pirated copies for permanent storage violated copyright law. Judge Alsup found Anthropic's training "exceedingly transformative," but ordered a trial on the company's use of over seven million pirated books. [...] Critically, the 40-page ruling repeatedly emphasized that the decision does not vindicate Meta's practices or provide legal cover for AI training on copyrighted works. "This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful," Judge Chhabria wrote. "It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one." Article continues below.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A federal judge sided with Facebook parent Meta Platforms in dismissing a copyright infringement lawsuit from a group of authors who accused the company of stealing their works to train its artificial intelligence technology. The Wednesday ruling from U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria was the second in a week from San Francisco’s federal court to dismiss major copyright claims from book authors against the rapidly developing AI industry. [...] On Monday, from the same courthouse, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that AI company Anthropic didn’t break the law by training its chatbot Claude on millions of copyrighted books, but the company must still go to trial for illicitly acquiring those books from pirate websites instead of buying them. [...] Although Meta prevailed in its request to dismiss the case, it could turn out to be a pyrrhic victory. In his 40-page ruling, Chhabria repeatedly indicated reasons to believe that Meta and other AI companies have turned into serial copyright infringers as they train their technology on books and other works created by humans, and seemed to be inviting other authors to bring cases to his court presented in a manner that would allow them to proceed to trial.

Meta on Wednesday prevailed against a group of 13 authors in a major copyright case involving the company’s Llama artificial intelligence model, but the judge made clear his ruling was limited to this case. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria sided with Meta’s argument that the company’s use of books to train its large language models, or LLMs, is protected under the fair use doctrine of U.S. copyright law. [...] \ The judge wrote that it “is generally illegal to copy protected works without permission,” but in this case, the plaintiffs failed to present a compelling argument that Meta’s methods caused “market harm.” \ U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria left the door open for other authors to bring similar AI-related copyright lawsuits against Meta. “In the grand scheme of things, the consequences of this ruling are limited,” he wrote. [...] “On this record Meta has defeated the plaintiffs’ half-hearted argument that its copying causes or threatens significant market harm,” Chhabria said. “That conclusion may be in significant tension with reality.” Meta’s practice of “copying the work for a transformative purpose” is protected by the fair use doctrine, the judge wrote.

A federal judge granted partial summary judgment to Meta on Wednesday, despite claims from 13 award-winning and acclaimed authors who argued that the tech giant violated U.S. copyright law by using their works to train its flagship AI modelLlamawithout their permission. Although U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria seemed to sympathize with the plaintiffs, he said he had “no choice” but to rule in Meta’s favor, given the poor arguments by the authors. [...] However, the judge said his ruling wasn’t necessarily a huge win for Meta, nor a colossal setback for artists in their struggle against AI-generated content, because it only affects the rights of these thirteen authors — not the countless others whose works Meta used to train its models. “And, as should now be clear, this ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,” Chhabria said. [...] The judge said that if the authors presented any evidence on the issue, the case would have needed to go to a jury. He even suggested that they could have made a strong enough showing to win on the fair use issue at summary judgment. But lacking that, the decision belonged to Meta, he ruled.