--- title: "Meta Says It’s Okay to Feed Copyrighted Books Into Its AI Model Because They Have No “Economic Value”" description: "Accused of illegally using copyrighted books to train its AI, Meta argues that those books are individually worthless." date: "2025-04-19" modified: "2025-04-19" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/meta-copyrighted-books-no-value" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" - "Meta" tags: - "ai copyright" - "generative ai" - "Meta" --- # Meta Says It’s Okay to Feed Copyrighted Books Into Its AI Model Because They Have No “Economic Value” ![Accused of illegally using copyrighted books to train its AI, Meta argues that those books are individually worthless.]() *\Image: Getty / Futurism\* Meta has been accused of illegally using copyrighted material to train its AI models — and the tech giant's defense is pretty thin. In the [ongoing suit]() *Richard Kadrey et al v. Meta Platforms*, led by a group of authors including Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer and National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company has argued that its alleged [scraping of over seven million books]() from the pirated library LibGen constituted "fair use" of the material, and was therefore not illegal. The specious defenses don't end there. As [*Vanity Fair* ]()[spotlights]() in a new writeup, Meta's attorneys are also arguing that the countless books that the company used to train its multibillion-dollar language models and springboard itself into the headspinningly buzzy AI race are actually worthless. Meta cited an expert witness who downplayed the books' individual importance, averring that a single book adjusted its LLM's performance "by less than 0.06 percent on industry standard benchmarks, a meaningless change no different from noise." Thus there's no market in paying authors to use their copyrighted works, Meta says, because "for there to be a market, there must be something of value to exchange," as quoted by *Vanity Fair* — "but none of \[the authors'\] works has economic value, individually, as training data." Other communications showed that Meta employees stripped the copyright pages from the downloaded books. This is emblematic of the chicaneries and two-faced logic that Meta, and the AI industry at large, deploys when it's pressed about all the human-created content it devours. Somehow, that stuff is simultaneously not that valuable, and we should all stop pearl-clutching about the sanctity of art, and anyway an AI [writes creative prose just as well as a human now]() — but is also absolutely essential to building our new synthetic gods that [will solve climate change](), so please don't make us pay for using any of it. That last bit is literally what OpenAI [argued to the British Parliament]() last year — that there isn't enough stuff in the public domain to beef up its AI models, so it must be allowed to plumb the bounties of contemporary copyrighted works without paying a penny. Seemingly, this is an unspoken understanding at the top AI companies. When one Meta researcher inquired if the company's legal team had okayed using LibGen, another responded: "I didn't ask questions but this is what OpenAI does with GPT3, what Google does with PALM, and what Deepmind does with Chinchilla so we will do it to\[o\]," per *Vanity Fair*, from internal messages cited in the suit. Tellingly, the unofficial policy seems to be to not speak about it at all. "In no case would we disclose publicly that we had trained on LibGen, however there is practical risk external parties could deduce our use of this dataset," an internal Meta slide deck read. The deck noted that "if there is media coverage suggesting we have used a dataset we know to be pirated, such as LibGen, this may undermine our negotiating position with regulators on these issues." **More on AI copyright:** *[OpenAI Says It’s "Over" If It Can’t Steal All Your Copyrighted Work]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()