French publishers and authors are suing Meta Platforms Inc. for copyright infringement, accusing the tech giant of using their books to train its generative artificial intelligence model without authorization.

SNE, the trade association representing major French publishers including Hachette and Editis, along with authors’ association SGDL and writers’ union SNAC, filed a complaint this week in a Paris court dedicated to intellectual property, the group said at a press conference on Wednesday.

The group said it had gathered evidence of “massive” breaches of copyright and had already reached out to Meta with no success, SNE’s president Vincent Montagne said. It has also notified the European Commission, alleging that Meta’s activities violate EU rules on AI, he added.

A representative for Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Generative AI language models like Meta’s Llama or OpenAI’s ChatGPT have been trained on very large amounts of text data, including books and articles. This has unleashed a wave of lawsuits across the globe, where content publishers allege that using their work to train AI models is tantamount to theft. The AI companies have generally been reluctant to disclose the sources of their training data but have argued that using it constitutes “fair use” under US copyright law.

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft Corp. in December 2023 over the use of its articles to train large-language models. In April 2024, a group of authors proposed a class-action against Amazon.com Inc.-backed Anthropic over the alleged use of their books to train its AI model. Indian book publishers filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI in January.

Photograph: Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Photo credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

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