The representative organizations of publishers and authors in France announced, Wednesday, March 12, prosecution against the American Meta for copyright violation, after the use of their books to design generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications. These organizations denounced in a press release “A massive use of works under rights, without authorization from their authors and [leurs] publishers “.
It is the National Edition Union (SNE), the Société des Gens de Lettres (SGDL) and the National Union of Authors and Composers (SNAC), who seize the Paris court. “We have noted the presence of many works published by members of the National Edition union in the corpus of data used by Meta”said the president of the SNE, Vincent Montagne, quoted in the press release.
To improve its LLAMA language model, the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s parent company has indeed used a database until 2023 containing the text of nearly 200,000 books – including some in French -, books3, constituted in defiance of copyright.
The “dangers of AI” pointed out
Meta himself had recognized it, in January 2024, as part of a legal proceedings brought in the United States by authors whose books appear in this database. In this procedure, the group defends itself by asserting its reasonable use (“Fair Use”) Books in question. “The creation of an AI market cannot be conceived at the expense of the culture sector”said Mr. Mountain.
No estimate of the damage has been disclosed at this stage. “The action we start must also give birth to a serious will to take into account the creation, to respect the legal framework and, if necessary, to find counterparties for the use of works they feed”explained the president of the SGDL, Christophe Hardy.
Snac president François Peyrony said he wanted ” protect “ the authors “Dangers of AI that plunders their works and cultural heritage to train”. Generative artificial intelligences, he deplores, can then write whole books in a few hours “Who compete with the real books of authors”.