Meta’s AI Copyright Fight Just Escalated and Hollywood Is Watching Closely; Los Angeles Magazine, May 7, 2026

 DEVON JAMES , Los Angeles Magazine; Meta’s AI Copyright Fight Just Escalated and Hollywood Is Watching Closely

A new lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg and Meta could reshape how studios, publishers and tech companies train the next generation of artificial intelligence

"The AI Gold Rush Is Running Into Copyright Law

According to the lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court, Meta allegedly pulled material from massive libraries of pirated books and scraped internet content to train Llama, the company’s flagship large language model. Publishers argue the practice amounts to one of the largest copyright violations in modern history."

Mark Zuckerberg ‘personally authorized’ Meta’s copyright infringement, publishers allege; AP, May 5, 2026

 HILLEL ITALIE , AP; Mark Zuckerberg ‘personally authorized’ Meta’s copyright infringement, publishers allege

"The plaintiffs allege that Zuckerberg and Meta “followed their well-known motto ‘move fast and break things’” by illegally drawing upon a massive trove of books and journal articles for Llama."

Scott Turow's latest real-life legal thriller: Suing Meta for copyright infringement; NPR, May 5, 2026

 Chloe Veltman, NPR ; Scott Turow's latest real-life legal thriller: Suing Meta for copyright infringement

""All Americans should understand that the bold future promised by A.I., has been, to paraphrase the investigative writer Alex Reisner, created with stolen words," said Turow in a statement to NPR. "It is all the more shameful that these violations of the law were undertaken by one of the richest corporations in the world."

According to the complaint, Meta "briefly considered licensing deals with major publishers" but changed its strategy in April 2023. The question of whether to license or pirate moving forward was "escalated" to Zuckerberg, after which, the complaint alleges, Meta's business development team received verbal instructions to stop licensing efforts. "If we license once [sic] single book, we won't be able to lean into the fair use strategy," a Meta employee is quoted as saying in the complaint.

"It's the most flagrant copyright breach in history," said Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger in a statement to NPR. "And these voracious tech companies need to be held accountable.""

Publishers sue Meta, claiming it violated copyrights in training AI with their books; The Washington Post, May 5, 2026

 Maegan Vazquez, The Washington Post; Publishers sue Meta, claiming it violated copyrights in training AI with their books

"The case, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, is the latest in a string of lawsuits brought by publishers, authors, artists, photographers and news outlets aimed at forcing tech companies to compensate them for using their works to train their AI models. The plaintiffs argue in the lawsuit that the AI model’s ability to quickly produce knockoffs and summaries of copyrighted books threatens the livelihoods of publishers and authors.

A Meta spokesperson said in a statement that the company would “fight this lawsuit aggressively.”

“AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use,” the spokesperson said.

The publishers’ complaint states Meta distributed millions of copyrighted works without authorization and without compensating authors or publishers, claiming that Zuckerberg “personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement.” They also claim that Meta removed copyright notices and copyright management information from the works used to train the AI model, known as Llama."

Even More Authors, Publishers Sue Meta Over Copyright in AI Training: What's Different Now; CNET, May 5, 2026

 Katelyn Chedraoui , CNET; Even More Authors, Publishers Sue Meta Over Copyright in AI Training: What's Different Now

Meta won a previous AI lawsuit brought by authors. Publishers are taking a different route this time.

"New lawsuit, same questions

Copyright is one of the most contentious legal issues around AI. Tech companies like Meta need high-quality, human-created data to build and refine their AI models. Nearly all of this material is protected by copyright. That means tech companies have to enter into licensing agreements or defend their use of the content as fair use under a provision of copyright law.

Meta and Anthropic have both won previous cases in lawsuits brought by authors, successfully defending their fair use. Anthropic agreed to settle some piracy claims with authors for $1.5 billion, or about $3,000 per pirated work. Both judges warned in their decisions that this won't be the result in every lawsuit...

One of the biggest considerations in these cases is whether tech companies' use of copyrighted books will make it harder for human authors to sell their work or otherwise affect the marketplace."

Complaint: ELSEVIER INC., CENGAGE LEARNING, INC., HACHETTE BOOK GROUP, INC., MACMILLAN PUBLISHING GROUP, LLC D/B/A MACMILLAN PUBLISHERS, MCGRAW HILL LLC, SCOTT TUROW, and S.C.R.I.B.E., INC., individually and on behalf of others similarly situated, Plaintiffs, v. META PLATFORMS, INC. and MARK ZUCKERBERG, Defendants.; May 5, 2026

 Complaint: ELSEVIER INC., CENGAGE LEARNING, INC., HACHETTE BOOK GROUP, INC., MACMILLAN PUBLISHING GROUP, LLC D/B/A MACMILLAN PUBLISHERS, MCGRAW HILL LLC, SCOTT TUROW, and S.C.R.I.B.E., INC., individually and on behalf of others similarly situated,

Plaintiffs,

v.

META PLATFORMS, INC. and MARK ZUCKERBERG,

Defendants.

Five Publishers and Scott Turow Sue Meta and Mark Zuckerberg; The New York Times, May 5, 2026

 Alexandra Alter , The New York Times; Five Publishers and Scott Turow Sue Meta and Mark Zuckerberg

The class-action lawsuit accuses the tech giant and its founder and chief executive of infringing on authors’ copyrights.

"Five major publishers — Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage — and the best-selling novelist Scott Turow have filed a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta and its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.

The complaint, which was filed on Tuesday morning in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses Meta and Zuckerberg of illegally using millions of copyrighted works to train their artificial intelligence program Llama, and of removing copyright notices and other copyright management information from those works.

The lawsuit asserts that Meta’s engineers relied on pirated books and journal articles to train the program by downloading unlicensed copies through websites like Anna’s Archive, an open source search engine for piracy sites including LibGen and Sci-Hub. The suit also claims that “Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement.”"

Major publishers sued Meta for pirating millions of books to train its AI; Quartz, May 5, 2026

 Cris Tolomia, Quartz; Major publishers sued Meta for pirating millions of books to train its AI

"Five major publishers and best-selling novelist Scott Turow filed a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta$META -1.49% and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, alleging the company pirated millions of books and journal articles to train its Llama artificial intelligence models."

Mark Zuckerberg Takes the Stand in Landmark Social Media Addiction Trial; The New York Times, February 18, 2026

 Eli Tan, The New York Times; Mark Zuckerberg Takes the Stand in Landmark Social Media Addiction Trial

"Mr. Zuckerberg’s appearance in court — his first time testifying about child safety in front of a jury — was highly anticipated. Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook and has more than 3.5 billion users, has come under fire as one of the biggest providers of platforms for teenagers. Parents, as well as tech policy and child safety groups have accused the company of hooking young people on its apps and causing mental health issues that have led to anxiety, depression, eating disorders and self-harm...

In internal documents that surfaced in some of the lawsuits, Mr. Zuckerberg and other Meta leaders repeatedly played down their platforms’ risks to young people, while rejecting employee pleas to bolster youth guardrails and hire additional staff...

K.G.M.’s lawyer, Mark Lanier, said during his opening statement this month that Instagram and YouTube’s apps were built like “digital casinos” that profited off addictive behavior. He pointed to internal documents from Meta and Google, which owns YouTube, comparing their technology to gambling, tobacco and drug use. In a 2015 memo, Mr. Zuckerberg encouraged executives to prioritize increasing the time that teenagers spend on Meta’s apps.

Meta said in its opening statement that K.G.M.’s mental health issues were caused by familial abuse and turmoil. The company presented medical records to show that social media addiction was not a focus of her therapy sessions."

Three billionaires: America’s oligarchy is now fully exposed; The Guardian, February 27, 2025

 Robert Reich, The Guardian; Three billionaires: America’s oligarchy is now fully exposed

"One of the unacknowledged advantages of the horrendous era we’ve entered is that it is revealing the putrid connections between great wealth and great power for all to see.

Oligarchs are fully exposed and they are defiant. It’s like hitting the “reveal codes” key on older computers that let you see everything.

On Wednesday, Jeff Bezos, the third-richest person in America, who bought the Washington Post in 2013, announced that the paper’s opinion section would henceforth focus on defending “personal liberties and free markets”.

Anything inconsistent with this view would not be published, according to his statement. “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

The Post’s opinion editor, David Shipley, promptly resigned, as he should have...

Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, bought Twitter in 2022, laid off everyone who was filtering out hateful crap on the platform, renamed it X and turned it into a cesspool of lies in support of Trump.

Mark Zuckerberg, the second-richest person, has followed suit, allowing Facebook to emit lies, hate and bigotry in support of Trump’s lies, hate and bigotry.

All three of these men were in the first row at Trump’s inauguration. They, and other billionaires, have now exposed themselves for what they are.

They are the oligarchy. They continue to siphon off the wealth of the nation. They are supporting a tyrant who is promising them tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks that will make them even richer.

They are destroying democracy so they won’t have to worry about “parasites” (as Musk calls people who depend on government assistance) demanding anything more from them.

When billionaires take control of our communication channels, it’s not a win for free speech. It’s a win for their billionaire babble."

Our job is to be truthful not neutral’: Christiane Amanpour on Trump, tech and and fighting for the truth; The Observer, via The Guardian, January 25, 2025

 Tim Adams, The Observer via The Guardian; Our job is to be truthful not neutral’: Christiane Amanpour on Trump, tech and and fighting for the truth

"Amanpour works to a trusted formula: “Our job is to be truthful, not neutral,” she says. When we speak, the news is full of the malign influence of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg on the global conversation.

As someone who originally owed her lucrative journalistic career to a billionaire, the “visionary” – her word – CNN founder Ted Turner, Amanpour is fully aware that rich men have always seen news as a business opportunity. Social media oligarchs, however, want to pocket the billions with none of the attendant responsibilities. Never a doom scroller, she sees Mark Zuckerberg’s utterly shameless decision to remove all factchecking from his Meta platforms as a drastic escalation of that policy.

“Of course, not everybody’s going to agree on everything and nor should they,” she says. “But unless we can agree that the sky outside is blue and the grass is green, we have no chance. What is overtaking the public square is that every single fact is now the subject of accusations of lies or bias. Zuckerberg enabling totally permissive commentary is another arrow in the heart of truth.”"

Mark Zuckerberg Is Done With Politics; The New York Times, September 24, 2024

 Theodore Schleifer and Mike Isaac, The New York Times; Mark Zuckerberg Is Done With Politics

"Instead of publicly engaging with Washington, Mr. Zuckerberg is repairing relationships with politicians behind the scenes. After the “Zuckerbucks” criticism, Mr. Zuckerberg hired Brian Baker, a prominent Republican strategist, to improve his positioning with right-wing media and Republican officials. In the lead-up to November’s election, Mr. Baker has emphasized to Mr. Trump and his top aides that Mr. Zuckerberg has no plans to make similar donations, a person familiar with the discussions said.

Mr. Zuckerberg has yet to forge a relationship with Vice President Kamala Harris. But over the summer, Mr. Zuckerberg had his first conversations with Mr. Trump since he left office, according to people familiar with the conversations."

Mark Zuckerberg Isn’t Done With Politics. His Politics Have Just Changed.; Mother Jones, September 24, 2024

Tim Murphy, Mother Jones; Mark Zuckerberg Isn’t Done With Politics. His Politics Have Just Changed.

"On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that one of the world’s richest men had recently experienced a major epiphany. After bankrolling a political organization that supported immigration reform, espousing his support for social justice, and donating hundreds of millions of dollars to support local election workers during the 2020 election, “Mark Zuckerberg is done with politics.”

The Facebook founder and part-time Hawaiian feudal lord, according to the piece, “believed that both parties loathed technology and that trying to continue engaging with political causes would only draw further scrutiny to their company,” and felt burned by the criticism he has faced in recent years, on everything from the proliferation of disinformation on Facebook to his investment in election administration (which conservatives dismissively referred to as “Zuckerbucks”). He is mad, in other words, that people are mad at him, and it has made him rethink his entire theory of how the world works.

It’s an interesting piece, which identifies a real switch in how Zuckerberg—who along with his wife, Priscilla Chan, has made a non-binding pledge to give away a majority of his wealth by the end of his lifetime—thinks about his influence and his own ideology. But there’s a fallacy underpinning that headline: Zuckerberg isn’t done with politics. His politics have simply changed."

Meta Fails to Block Zuckerberg Deposition in AI Copyright Suit; Bloomberg Law, September 25, 2024

  Aruni Soni, Bloomberg Law; Meta Fails to Block Zuckerberg Deposition in AI Copyright Suit

"A federal magistrate judge opened the door to a deposition of Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a copyright lawsuit over the tech company’s large language model, denying the social media giant’s bid for a protective order.

Magistrate Judge Thomas S. Hixson denied the request to block the deposition because the plaintiffs supplied enough evidence that Zuckerberg is the “chief decision maker and policy setter for Meta’s Generative AI branch and the development of the large language models at issue in this action,” he said in the order filed Tuesday in the US District Court for the Northern District."

Facebook runs the coward’s playbook to smear the whistleblower; The Verge, October 5, 2021

 Elizabeth Lopatto, The Verge; Facebook runs the coward’s playbook to smear the whistleblower

 

"Facebook has chosen to respond to whistleblower Frances Haugen in the most cowardly way possible: by hiding Mark Zuckerberg, the man ultimately responsible for Facebook’s decisions, and beginning the process of trying to smear and discredit Haugen.

This is some Big Tobacco bullshit — precisely what sleazeball PR guru John Scanlon was hired to do when Jeffrey Wigand blew the whistle on tobacco company Brown and Williamson. Scanlon’s task was to change “the story of B&W to a narrative about Wigand’s personality.”

Of course, that strategy “backfired completely,” Vanity Fair reported in 2004. It probably won’t work here, either. One senator, Edward Markey of Massachusetts, has already called Haugen “a 21st-century American hero,” adding that “our nation owes you a huge debt of gratitude.”...

But the funniest part is the absence of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO and the only shareholder with the power to replace himself. Zuckerberg started Facebook as a Hot-or-Not clone — which almost certainly would negatively affect teen girls’ self-esteem. (At least he is consistent, I guess.) The decisions Haugen alleges, which put profits ahead of morals, have also enriched him more than anyone else. The buck stops, quite literally, with him. So where is he?"

The Black-and-White World of Big Tech; The New York Times, October 24, 2019

Kara Swisher, The New York Times; The Black-and-White World of Big Tech

Mark Zuckerberg presented us with an either-or choice of free speech — either we have it or we’re China. Tech leaders have a duty to admit it’s much more complicated.

"Mr. Zuckerberg presented us with an either-or choice of free speech — either we have free speech or we’re China. “Whether you like Facebook or not, I think we need to come together and stand for voice and free expression,” he said with an isn’t-this-obvious tone.

But, as anyone who has lived in the real world knows, it’s much more complex. And that was the main problem with his speech — and it’s also what is at the crux of the myriad concerns we have with tech these days: Big Tech’s leaders frame the debate in binary terms. 

Mr. Zuckerberg missed an opportunity to recognize that there has been a hidden and high price of all the dazzling tech of the last decade. In offering us a binary view for considering the impact of their inventions, many digital leaders avoid thinking harder about the costs of technological progress."

If Mark Zuckerberg Wants to Talk, Britain Is Waiting: Facebook leadership has a history of lashing out instead of opening up; The New York Times, January 22, 2019

Damian Collins, The New York Times; If Mark Zuckerberg Wants to Talk, Britain Is Waiting:

Facebook leadership has a history of lashing out instead of opening up

"Mr. Collins is a member of the British Parliament....

So much of our lives is organized through social media, and many people use social media platforms as the main source of information about the world around them. We cannot allow this public space to become a complete wild West, with little or no protection for the citizen user. The rights and responsibilities that we enjoy in the real world need to exist and be protected online as well."

Why Should Anyone Believe Facebook Anymore?; Wired, December 19, 2018

Fred Vogelstein, Wired;

Why Should Anyone Believe Facebook Anymore?

"Americans are weird about their tycoons. We have a soft spot for success, especially success from people as young as Zuckerberg was when he started Facebook. But we hate it when they become as super-rich and powerful as he is now and seem accountable to no one. We'll tolerate rogues like Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of Oracle, who once happily admitted to hiring investigators to search Bill Gates' trash. Ellison makes no effort to hide the fact that he's in it for the money and the power. But what people despise more than anything is what we have now with tech companies in Silicon Valley, especially with Facebook: greed falsely wrapped in sanctimony.

Facebook gave the world a great new tool for staying connected. Zuckerberg even pitched it as a better internet—a safe space away from the anonymous trolls lurking everywhere else online. But it’s now rather debatable whether Facebook is really a better internet that is making the world a better place, or just another big powerful corporation out to make as much money as possible. Perhaps the world would be happier with Zuckerberg and Facebook, and the rest of their Silicon Valley brethren, if they stopped pretending to be people and businesses they are not."

Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘War’-Like Style Is Driving Top Executives Out: WSJ; The Daily Beast, November 18, 2018

The Daily Beast; Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘War’-Like Style Is Driving Top Executives Out: WSJ

"In June, with Facebook under siege for its role in the Cambridge Analytica debacle, CEO Mark Zuckerberg gathered top executives in a previously unreported meeting to tell them that the company was at “war” and that he would change his leadership style accordingly, according to The Wall Street Journal. Zuckerberg’s shift to a more aggressive leadership style has led to “unprecedented turmoil” in the upper ranks of the tech giant, the Journal reports..."

Facebook and the Fires; The New York Times, November 15, 2018

Kara Swisher, The New York Times; Facebook and the Fires

"Don’t Be Afraid of Self-Reflection

That man in the mirror is typically a man, and a young, white, privileged one, whose capacity for self-reflection is about as big as Donald Trump’s ability to stop hate-tweeting. But self-reflection is the hallmark of maturity and good decision-making. Of all the interviews I have done in Silicon Valley, I keep coming back to the one I did with Mr. Zuckerberg this summer, in which I pressed him to reflect on how his invention had caused deaths in places like India and Myanmar.

After trying several times to get an answer from him, I got frustrated: “What kind of responsibility do you feel?” I said I would feel sick to my stomach to know that people died possibly “because of something I invented. What does that make you feel like? What do you do when you see that? What do you do yourself? What’s your emotion?”

Mr. Zuckerberg’s answer left me cold. And also more than a little worried for the future of his company. It’s bad enough not to be able to anticipate disaster; it’s worse, after disaster strikes, to not be able to reflect on how it happened.

“I mean, my emotion is feeling a deep sense of responsibility to try to fix the problem,” he said. “I don’t know, that’s a … that’s the most productive stance.”

But it’s not the most productive stance. As with those California fires, putting out the flames is important. But understanding how they got started in the first place, to stop it from happening again, is what actually keeps us from hurtling over the edge."