Artificial intelligence lawsuit against media giant Meta

This judicial move, which started in Norway, is the latest in a series of giant copyright lawsuits filed around the world against Meta's data collection activities for artificial intelligence education.

The technology giant faces serious accusations in both the USA and Europe for using copyrighted content without permission to feed artificial intelligence systems such as Llama and Muse.

One of the biggest legal showdowns in the publishing world began in May this year.

Five major publishing houses such as Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan and McGraw Hill, together with the famous author Scott Turow, filed a class-action lawsuit against Meta and its top executive Mark Zuckerberg by applying to the Manhattan Federal Court on May 5, 2026.

The lawsuit alleges that millions of copyrighted works, from textbooks to novels, were reproduced and distributed without permission in order to train the Llama language model, and that the copyright management information of the works was deliberately deleted.

Moreover, the accusations do not end there; It is alleged that Meta illegally downloaded these works from pirated digital archive sites such as LibGen, Z-Library and Anna's Archive.

Following the lawsuit filed by the publishing houses, individual reactions turned into organized resistance.

Approximately 300 people, including novelists, journalists and academics, went to the Federal Court for the Northern District of California on October 19, 2026, and filed individual copyright lawsuits against Meta.

The plaintiffs are seeking monetary damages from the company, stating that Meta copied and digitized their books without permission to train the Llama and Muse models.

On the European front, broadcasters focused on regulatory bodies.

News publishers, coming together under the umbrella of the European Publishers Council (EPC), officially filed a complaint against Meta's content screening and data processing policies to the authorized supervisory bodies in the European Union and the United Kingdom.

This growing legal and institutional pressure gave its first results.

Meta had to withdraw the controversial contract clause, which allowed the contents of business accounts to be scanned for artificial intelligence training, before it came into force on October 30, 2026, after intense objections.