SAN FRANCISCO, California: A U.S. judge has dismissed a copyright lawsuit filed by 13 authors against Meta Platforms, the company that owns Facebook. The authors had accused Meta of using their books without permission to train its artificial intelligence (AI) system.

The judge, Vince Chhabria, said the authors used the wrong legal arguments in their case, but also noted that his ruling does not necessarily mean Meta's actions are legal.

"This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful," Chhabria wrote. "It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one."

This was the second major case from San Francisco in one week to be dismissed in favor of the AI industry.

The authors include well-known names such as comedian Sarah Silverman and writers Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jacqueline Woodson. Their lawyers said the court acknowledged that using copyrighted books without permission is usually against the law. However, they disagreed with the decision to dismiss the case, especially since, in their view, Meta had clearly used pirated works.

Meta welcomed the ruling. The company said that open-source AI models, like the one it created called Llama, are helping drive innovation and creativity. It also argued that using copyrighted material in this way is allowed under "fair use," a part of U.S. copyright law that lets people use parts of copyrighted works to create something new.

Judge Chhabria's 40-page opinion pointed out that the case may have been dismissed, but Meta might still be guilty of copyright misuse. He suggested other authors could bring better-prepared lawsuits in the future. He also rejected arguments that following copyright rules would slow down AI development. He said companies making billions of dollars from AI can afford to pay authors for their work.

Earlier that same week, a different judge, William Alsup, also ruled on a similar case. He decided that the AI company Anthropic didn't break copyright law by using books to train its chatbot Claude, though it may still face trial for how it got those books, from illegal pirate websites.

In the Meta case, the authors said Meta took their books from pirated online libraries and used them to train its AI system, Llama. They argued that Meta should have paid to license those books. Meta replied that its AI doesn't copy or reproduce the original texts. Instead, it creates new writing based on what it learned from many sources. Meta also said there is no proof that anyone used Llama as a substitute for reading the authors' books.

Still, the authors' legal team said Meta was aware of the risks of using pirated content and even discussed it with top executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg. They said this shows Meta knew what it was doing might be illegal.

In the end, Judge Chhabria ruled that Meta had to win this case because of how the authors presented their arguments. However, he stressed that this decision does not apply to other writers who may want to sue Meta in the future.