France’s leading publishing and authors’ associations have filed a lawsuit against U.S. tech giant Meta for allegedly using copyrighted content without authorization to train its artificial intelligence systems.
The National Publishing Union, the National Union of Authors and Composers, and the Society of Men of Letters announced at a press conference on Wednesday that they had filed the complaint earlier this week in a Paris court. The lawsuit accuses Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, of copyright infringement and economic “parasitism.”
“We are witnessing monumental looting,” said Maia Bensimon, general delegate of SNAC. SNE Director General Renaud Lefebvre likened the case to a “David versus Goliath” battle, emphasizing its significance as a precedent-setting legal challenge.
This marks the first such lawsuit against an AI company in France, though similar legal actions have been taken in the United States. Notably, American actress and author Sarah Silverman, along with other writers, filed a lawsuit against Meta in 2023, claiming their books were misused to train its large language model, Llama. In October 2024, novelist Christopher Farnsworth also took legal action against the company.
Other tech firms, including OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, face multiple lawsuits in the U.S., Canada, and India over alleged copyright violations in AI training data.
