A federal judge in California has partially denied Meta’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by authors who claim the company used their copyrighted books to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models without permission.

In an order issued in early March, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria ruled that the authors’ claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) could proceed, while dismissing a separate claim under the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA) as preempted by federal copyright law.

The lawsuit, brought by writers including Richard Kadrey, centers on allegations that Meta stripped copyright management information (CMI) from their books before using them to train its large language model, Llama. The authors claim this act of removal was intended to conceal infringement and violated provisions of the DMCA.

Judge Chhabria found the authors had alleged a sufficiently concrete injury to establish standing under Article III of the Constitution. The removal of CMI, he said, was closely tied to traditional copyright harms. Furthermore, the authors claimed that Meta’s actions facilitated or concealed infringement—allegations which support their case moving forward.

While the court agreed the plaintiffs had not convincingly shown that CMI removal “enabled” Meta to infringe, it accepted the argument that the company intentionally removed identifying information to prevent its AI from revealing training on copyrighted works. That alone, the judge ruled, supports a “reasonable, if not particularly strong, inference” of concealment under the DMCA.

The CDAFA claim, however, was dismissed without leave to amend. Judge Chhabria said the claim was entirely based on the authors’ copyright ownership, and not on any independent rights under California law. As a result, it was preempted by the Copyright Act.

The ruling allows the authors’ DMCA claim to proceed as the case enters further litigation stages. Meta has acknowledged some of its early models were trained on datasets containing copyrighted material but disputes the claims of infringement. The outcome of this case could have broader implications for how AI companies use third-party content to build generative models.

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