Nearly 300 authors sue Meta for copyright infringement over AI training

Nearly 300 authors filed individual copyright suits against Meta Platforms Inc. on October 19, 2026, rejecting class action payouts in favor of pursuing up to $150,000 in statutory damages per work. The complaints allege Meta trained AI models on pirated books from shadow libraries and a bulk physical book-scanning operation named Project Vellum. Meta maintains its AI training is protected under fair use, setting up pivotal legal battles as AI copyright litigation expands across book, music, and news publishing industries.

Individual copyright lawsuits against Meta

• ▪Attorneys from Freedman Normand Friedland LLP and Stris & Maher LLP plan to file individual copyright lawsuits against Meta Platforms Inc. on behalf of up to 1,000 additional authors.
• ▪Authors participating in the October 19, 2026, individual lawsuits against Meta Platforms Inc. include Jacqueline Winspear, Reyna Grande, Mark Spragg, Rachel Nuwer, Silvia Foti, and Minxin Pei.
• ▪All authors suing Meta Platforms Inc. in the October 19, 2026, filings recruited through ClaimsHero, a platform that signed up authors to opt out of the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement.
• ▪The lawsuits filed against Meta Platforms Inc. on October 19, 2026, were brought as individual claims by authors rather than as a class action.
• ▪Nearly 300 authors filed five copyright complaints against Meta Platforms Inc. on October 19, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

AI training on pirated books

• ▪The complaints allege Meta Platforms Inc. operated a book-scanning program called Project Vellum starting around mid-2025 that purchased and scanned physical books to train its Muse Spark and Muse Glimmer AI models.
• ▪The authors' complaints allege Meta Platforms Inc. downloaded e-books from pirate shadow libraries, including LibGen, Z-Library, Anna's Archive, and the Books3 dataset, to train its large language models.
• ▪The complaints allege Meta Platforms Inc. used BitTorrent to download pirated books, stripped copyright notices from the files, and passed copies along to other users.

Statutory damages sought

• ▪The plaintiffs suing Meta Platforms Inc. in individual complaints are requesting jury trials to determine statutory damages under the Copyright Act rather than relying on class action settlements.
• ▪Each author suing Meta Platforms Inc. in the October 19, 2026, individual filings seeks maximum statutory damages under the Copyright Act of up to $150,000 per infringing work.

Settlement comparison

• ▪The Winspear v. Meta Platforms complaint argues that class action settlements resolve authors' copyright claims for pennies on the dollar to serve tech conglomerates rather than creators.
• ▪The $1.5 billion Anthropic class action settlement provides roughly $3,000 to each author who opted into the class.

Fair use defense

• ▪Meta Platforms Inc. argues that using copyrighted books to train AI models constitutes fair use under copyright law because the training transforms copies into new technology.
• ▪In the Kadrey v. Meta Platforms class action, Judge Vince Chhabria ruled Meta's AI training on authors' books was fair use because plaintiffs failed to prove market harm from market dilution.
• ▪Anthropic urged US District Judge Eumi Lee on October 21, 2026, to rule that training its chatbot Claude on song lyrics is protected under the fair use doctrine.

AI copyright litigation landscape

• ▪Music publishers Universal Music Group, Concord, and ABKCO sued Anthropic in 2023 over its use of song lyrics to train its AI chatbot Claude.
• ▪Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Press sued AI company Anthropic in an Ontario court on October 6, 2026, alleging unauthorized scraping and use of news content for Claude.