[AI. Photo Credit to Pixabay]

On February 5th, a significant copyright lawsuit was filed in San Francisco, California.

A number of writers, including author Richard Kadrey, filed a lawsuit against Meta, one of the largest tech companies in the United States. 

Meta was sued over allegations that it used approximately 190,000 illegally copied books to train its AI model, Llama. 

This lawsuit was particularly significant as its outcome could impact Meta’s financial standing; should the court rule in favor of the writers, the company may be required to pay substantial damages.

However, Judge Vince Chhabria appeared to favor Meta during the proceedings and he informed the writers’ legal team that their arguments were “inadequate to approve a class-action lawsuit.”

On March 25, 2026, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria allowed plaintiffs to amend their copyright claims in a copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta.

Chhabria allowed plaintiffs to add a contributory infringement claim to the lawsuit, while the judge stated that the claim should have already been included in previous complaints. 

Although Chhabria allowed the amending progress, he criticized the aspects of plaintiffs’ legal claim.

Chhabria wrote, “In other words, the plaintiffs seek now to add a new legal claim based on factual allegations they already added the last time around” and said that plaintiffs blamed Meta’s lawyers instead of taking a fair amount of responsibility.

Chhabria noted, "It appears that counsel's strategy throughout this litigation (and particularly since the Boies Schiller firm came in and took the lead) has been to distract from its own mistakes (and there have been many) by bashing Meta."

Apparently, the March 26, 2026 ruling was not a new trend and plaintiffs were not favored by the judge, even though the plaintiffs were given chances to revise their legal arguments.

This incident bore a striking resemblance to a case from June 2026, in which the summary phase included the judgement that training an AI model does not regulate the copyright law.

On March 16, 2026, the lawsuit was filed by Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster, against OpenAI.

The dictionaries sued OpenAI, alleging that OpenAI has used copyrighted contents without permission to train AI models.

The plaintiffs argued that OpenAI used more than thousands of articles and dictionary entries that were copyrighted.

The responses that OpenAI gives as chatbots can closely resemble the original content or even reproduce the original content, which goes against copyright.

The companies raise issues that ChatGPT may reduce the use of the dictionary websites themselves and eventually decrease their revenue, meanwhile OpenAI argues that the dictionaries are publicly open to everyone.

These cases have prompted different companies to focus on the issue regarding AI usage and its copyright regulations.

Legal boundaries of AI still remain unresolved, so the severity of the AI copyright issue continues to escalate.