Zuckerberg Allegedly Approved Millions of Copies: Meta Copyright Lawsuit

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Five publishers and author Scott Turow sued Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on May 5 in federal court in New York, alleging in a Meta copyright lawsuit that the company copied millions of books, articles, and other works to train its Llama AI systems.

According to Variety, the complaint says Zuckerberg “personally authorized and actively encouraged” the alleged copying, including torrents of copyrighted books and journal articles from pirate sites and web scrapes of “virtually the entire internet.” The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages.

Meta and Zuckerberg are accused of authorizing mass copying for AI training

The complaint alleges Meta and Zuckerberg illegally copied source material at large scale for AI training copyright purposes. Plaintiffs say Meta first obtained books and journal articles from pirate sources, then made additional copies while using the material to train Llama.

Variety reported that the lawsuit describes the conduct as one of the largest alleged copyright infringements on record. The plaintiffs quote Meta’s old “move fast and break things” motto in the filing and say the company followed that approach in building generative AI systems.

The most specific allegation in the Meta copyright lawsuit is the one aimed at Zuckerberg personally. Plaintiffs say he did not just oversee Meta broadly, but authorized and encouraged the copying tied to Llama training.

Five publishers and Scott Turow filed the lawsuit in New York

The plaintiffs are Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier, and Cengage, along with Turow suing individually. Variety reported that they filed the case in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Tuesday, May 5.

The case is framed as a proposed class action. The complaint asks for monetary damages, but the amount was not specified in the report.

Turow is both an author and a lawyer, which makes for a fairly direct plaintiff list here: major publishers plus a named writer. That is more concrete than the usual “authors group” label that shows up in AI cases.

Meta says AI training on copyrighted material can be fair use

Meta told Variety it plans to contest the claims. A company spokesperson said, “AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use. We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”

That response puts the legal fight on a familiar line: whether using copyrighted works in model training counts as fair use. In this Meta copyright lawsuit, Meta is not denying that copyrighted material can be part of AI training disputes; it is saying courts have already accepted fair-use arguments in some circumstances.

The complaint builds on earlier Meta AI copyright fights

Variety pointed to a June 2025 ruling in a separate case against Meta brought by 13 authors, including Sarah Silverman and Junot Díaz. In that case, federal judge Vincent Chhabria rejected the authors’ claim that Meta violated their copyrights by training Llama on their books.

According to Variety, Chhabria ruled that Meta’s use of a dataset of nearly 200,000 books to train Llama qualified as fair use. That earlier ruling is relevant background because it involved the same company, the same model family, and the same core dispute over AI training copyright.

The new case differs at least in the plaintiffs and in the way the allegations are framed. This time, the complaint centers major publishers, Scott Turow, and the claim that Zuckerberg personally approved the alleged copying behind the Llama copyright case.

Key Takeaways

A Meta copyright lawsuit filed May 5 accuses Meta and Mark Zuckerberg of copying millions of books, articles, and other works to train Llama.
The plaintiffs are Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier, Cengage, and author Scott Turow.
The case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York as a proposed class action seeking unspecified damages.
Meta says training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use and said it will fight the lawsuit.
Variety linked the case to a June 2025 ruling in which Judge Vincent Chhabria found Meta’s training on a dataset of nearly 200,000 books was fair use.