With Judge Alsup’s split decision in Bartz v. Anthropic, all eyes now turn to Judge Chhabria for his ruling on fair use versus infringement in the Kadrey v. Meta suit. The issues in the two cases are fairly similar involving book authors whose books were used to train AI models.
One procedural difference is that, unlike Bartz, the Kadrey plaintiffs filed their own summary judgment motion arguing that Meta’s acquisition of pirated books is infringement. But it’s unclear from Kadrey’s brief whether it made an argument about Meta creating a permanent library of the pirated books, which is what ultimately derailed Anthropic’s fair use defense in the decision by Judge Alsup.
If there’s no evidence of Meta building a library, then Judge Chhabria would have to rule on the lawfulness of downloading pirated books datasets (apart from any library building)–something Judge Alsup expressly declined to do, even though he strongly indicated it should still be considered infringement.
Kadrey brief on summary judgment
Meta’s Statement of Recent Decision