Meta Wins Again as Court Spurns Author Copyright Removal Claims

Meta Platforms Inc. continued to successfully fend off a copyright suit from a group of authors suing over its AI model when a federal court Friday ruled that the authors’ claims under a 1998 internet copyright law also fail.

Judge Vince Chhabria said in a short opinion that the authors’ claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the intentional removal of authorship, copyright, and licensing information from a work, lose because he ruled earlier this week that Meta didn’t violate the law by copying the books to train its AI model.

If Meta’s underlying use of the authors’ books is not copyright infringement and protected under the law’s fair use defense, then the tech giant can’t face liability under this law for removing “copyright management information” from the books, the judge said.

The ruling undercuts another legal avenue that copyright owners are attempting to use in numerous lawsuits against top generative AI companies.

Removal of that information can result in criminal liability under the DMCA, and “it is inconceivable that criminal liability would attach to an act that was done in furtherance of a noninfringing fair use,” Chhabria wrote.

“It does not make sense that Congress would have wanted to exempt secondary users who make a fair use from infringement liability, only to open them back up to DMCA liability if they removed some boilerplate in doing so,” the opinion said.

The DMCA, passed by Congress in 1998, updated copyright law for the internet age, establishing prohibitions on the removal of copyright management information from a work in an effort to conceal or facilitate copyright infringement.

The authors claimed that when Meta downloaded digital copies of their books from online piracy websites, engineers intentionally removed text about copyright terms and authorship information in an effort to hide their infringement.

Chhabria’s Friday ruling comes two days after he granted summary judgment to Meta on it’s argument that the company’s downloading of millions of books without permission from the authors to build its AI training database falls under copyright law’s fair use defense.

But he noted that his decision was largely the result of the authors’ lack of evidence that AI chatbots could undermine their books sales by flooding the market with cheap imitations. In most cases, AI training on unauthorized copies of books is illegal, the judge said.

Both parties didn’t immediately return requests for comment.

Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, Joseph Saveri Law Firm LLP, DiCello Levitt LLP, Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP, and Cafferty Clobes Meriwether & Sprengel LLP also represent the plaintiffs.

Cooley LLP, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP represent Meta.

The case is Kadrey v. Meta Platforms Inc., N.D. Cal., No. 3:23-cv-03417, 6/27/25.