• by Wendy Davis , June 10, 2026

Prominent authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Junot Diaz and Laura Lippman are asking a federal judge to authorize an appeal of his pro-Meta ruling in a battle over the tech company's alleged use of pirated books to train its large language models, Llama.

In a motion filed Wednesday, the authors say the dispute raises a "novel and highly consequential" issue, adding that an appellate decision "will have far-reaching effects that shape the contours of generative AI data acquisition practices and the intellectual property rights of millions."

Their motion comes in a battle dating to July 2023, when a group of authors alleged in a lawsuit that Meta downloaded books from free online "shadow libraries" that contained pirated material, and used the content to train Llama.

Meta countered that using copyrighted material to train large language models was a fair use, arguing that large language models can benefit "billions of people."

Chhabria sided with Meta, ruling last year that the company made fair use of the books.

He said in a written ruling that the authors failed to show that Meta copied the books in order "to create a product that will likely flood the market with similar works, causing market dilution."

He also wrote that Meta's use of the books to train large language models was transformative -- which is a factor judges look at when evaluating fair use. At the same time, Chhabria appeared to discount that factor, writing that using copyrighted works to train chatbots would probably infringe copyright "in most cases" because generative artificial intelligence "has the potential to flood the market with endless amounts of images, songs, articles, books, and more."

The same week that Chhabria issued his ruling, U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup, also in the Northern District of California, came to the opposite conclusion in a lawsuit against Anthropic. He ruled that the company was not entitled to a fair use defense regarding allegations that it infringed copyright by downloading millions of books from piracy sites. Anthropic later agreed to settle those claims for $1.5 billion.

The authors suing Meta say the different conclusions by Alsup and Chhabria regarding the use of pirated books for training purposes demonstrate the need for intervention by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

"Whether acquisition-by-piracy is permissible because of a downstream fair use is a critical question to answer uniformly and promptly because, in the absence of a clear rule, Meta and other AI companies will likely continue to use shadow libraries to take copyrighted works without permission, and to store and use those pirated works, which in turn will promote additional piracy by those shadow libraries and their users," the authors argue. "That feedback loop is having a major effect on the ability of rightsholders and law enforcement to shut down these illicit repositories, which were once on the brink of collapse."

Meta is expected to respond to the authors' motion by June 22.