Five major publishers are suing Meta over Llama. They have evidence that the previous plaintiffs did not.

Five Major Publishers Suing Meta Over Llama

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Five major publishers are suing Meta over Llama. They have evidence that the previous plaintiffs did not.

May 5, 2026 – 3:48 pm

Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan, and McGraw Hill, joined by author Scott Turow, filed a proposed class action in Manhattan on Tuesday alleging Meta pirated millions of their works to train Llama. After Judge Chhabria’s June 2025 ruling, plaintiffs with stronger market-harm evidence have been waiting their turn.

On Tuesday morning, five of the world’s largest publishers and one of America’s best-known novelists walked into a Manhattan federal courthouse and filed a proposed class action complaint against Meta Platforms. Reuters reported the case as Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan, and McGraw Hill, alongside the author Scott Turow, alleging that Meta pirated millions of their books and journal articles to train its Llama large-language models without permission, payment, or licence. The complaint asks the court to certify the case as a class action representing all similarly situated rights holders.

It is, by date, the latest in a long line of AI-training copyright cases. By substance, it is meaningfully different from most of those that have come before.

Why is this case not Kadrey?

Anyone who has been following AI-copyright litigation will recognise the name in the precedent slot: Kadrey v. Meta. That earlier case, filed in 2023 in the Northern District of California by authors including Sarah Silverman, Richard Kadrey, Christopher Golden, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Junot Díaz, and Michael Chabon, made effectively the same allegations: that Meta downloaded copyrighted books from pirate libraries (LibGen, Z-Library, and Anna’s Archive) and used them to train Llama.

Court records cited by Tom’s Hardware established that Meta employees torrented roughly 82 terabytes of pirated material in the process. Mark Zuckerberg personally signed off on the use of LibGen for Llama training, despite internal AI executives flagging it as a “data set we know to be pirated” that could “undermine [Meta’s] negotiating position with regulators.”

And Meta won that case. In June 2025, Judge Vince Chhabria granted summary judgment for Meta on fair-use grounds, finding that the use of copyrighted books to train Llama was sufficiently transformative to clear the fair-use threshold. But Chhabria’s ruling was unusually narrow and unusually candid about its limits. He said publicly that Meta’s win “may be in significant tension with reality” and that the ruling applied only to the specific authors who had brought the case. He noted explicitly that future plaintiffs could succeed if they presented stronger evidence of market harm, the prong of fair-use analysis on which the Kadrey plaintiffs had, in his view, fallen short.

Tuesday’s filing reads, on first inspection, as exactly the kind of case Chhabria invited.

What the publishers are bringing that the authors did not

There are three structural differences between Kadrey and the new lawsuit, and all three favour the plaintiffs. The first is the catalogue. Where Kadrey involved roughly 666 specific books, the new complaint alleges that Meta downloaded “at least 15 million” works from publishers’ catalogues.

The second difference is market harm. While the Kadrey authors relied largely on an argument about the devaluation of their intellectual property rights, the publishers allege a more direct and immediate harm: lost sales due to unauthorised reproduction of their works.

The third difference is standing. Unlike the Kadrey authors, who had to rely on secondary sources to show that Meta’s use of pirated material caused them harm, the publishers have direct evidence of lost sales.