Tired of “monumental looting,” French authors sue Meta

France's leading publishing and authors' associations have filed a lawsuit against US tech giant Meta for allegedly using copyright-protected content on a massive scale without authorisation to train its artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

Representatives for Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The National Publishing Union (SNE), the leading professional publishing association, the National Union of Authors and Composers (SNAC) and the Society of Men of Letters (SGDL), which defend the interests of authors, told a press conference on Wednesday they had filed a complaint against Meta earlier this week in a Paris court for alleged copyright infringement and economic "parasitism".

The three associations believe that Meta, which owns the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp social networks, was illegally using copyrighted content to train its AI models.

"We are witnessing monumental looting," said Maia Bensimon, general delegate of SNAC.

"It's a bit of a David versus Goliath battle," SNE Director General Renaud Lefebvre said. "It's a procedure that serves as an example," he added.

This is the first such action against an AI giant in France but there is a wave of lawsuits notably in the United States against Meta and other tech companies by authors, visual artists, music publishers and other copyright owners over the data used to train their generative AI systems.

In the United States, Meta is notably the target of a lawsuit filed in 2023 by American actress and author Sarah Silverman and other authors. The plaintiffs argue that Meta misused their books to train its large language model Llama.

American novelist Christopher Farnsworth filed a similar lawsuit against Meta in October 2024.

OpenAI, the company behind the AI tool ChatGPT, also faces a series of similar lawsuits in the United States, Canada, and India.