Five of the world's largest publishers — Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan, and McGraw Hill — joined by author Scott Turow, filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Meta in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday. The complaint alleges that Meta pirated millions of copyrighted books, textbooks, and journal articles to train its Llama large-language models without permission, payment, or license. The case seeks damages and injunctive relief for copyright infringement.
What makes this case different
The lawsuit follows the June 2025 ruling in Kadrey v. Meta, where Judge Vince Chhabria granted summary judgment for Meta on fair-use grounds. That ruling was narrow: it applied only to the specific authors who brought the case, and Chhabria noted that future plaintiffs could succeed if they presented stronger evidence of market harm. Tuesday's filing is structured to meet that standard.
Three structural differences distinguish this case from Kadrey:
Catalogue scope. The Kadrey case covered roughly 666 specific books from individual authors. The new complaint covers the entire publishing output of five companies that together account for a substantial share of the world's academic, educational, and trade publishing — including literary works, textbooks, scientific journal articles, and reference works.
Market-harm evidence. Academic and educational publishers can document specific revenue lines that AI-trained models substitute for. When Llama answers a student's biology question that would otherwise require consulting a Cengage textbook, the substitution is direct and measurable. This is the kind of identifiable market harm Chhabria's ruling identified as missing from Kadrey.
Licensing-market context. Since 2023, AI companies have signed licensing deals with publishers. Meta itself has licensed content from Reuters, CNN, Fox News, People Inc., and USA Today. The existence of these licenses is significant in fair-use law: courts now have evidence that a licensing market exists, that some publishers have priced and negotiated participation, and that Meta has chosen to participate in some markets while bypassing others.
The legal landscape
The case lands against the backdrop of the Bartz v. Anthropic settlement, where Anthropic agreed to pay authors as part of resolving a class action over similar allegations. The settlement amount set a marker for what AI-training copyright cases can produce at financial resolution.
Meta's legal exposure is not limited to copyright. The company is also facing a phase-two trial in Santa Fe, where the state of New Mexico is seeking algorithm changes, age-verification mandates, and a $3.7bn teen mental-health fund tied to youth-safety issues. Meta's Q1 2026 capex guidance is between $125bn and $