A Judge Says Meta's AI Copyright Case Is About 'the Next Taylor Swift'

US District Court Judge Vince Chhabria spent several hours grilling lawyers from both sides after they each filed motions for partial summary judgment, meaning they want Chhabria to rule on specific issues of the case rather than leaving each one to be decided at trial. The authors allege that Meta illegally used their work to build its generative AI tools, emphasizing that the company pirated their books through "shadow libraries" like LibGen. Kadrey v. Meta is one of the dozens of lawsuits filed against AI companies that are winding through the US legal system. While the authors were heavily focused on the piracy element of the case, Chhabria spoke emphatically about his belief that the big question is whether Meta's AI tools will hurt book sales and otherwise cause the authors to lose money. "If you are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person's work, and you're saying that you don't even have to pay a license to that person to use their work to create the product that's destroying the market for their work--I just don't understand how that can be fair use," he told Meta lawyer Kannon Shanmugam.