PARIS, March 12, 2025 (BSS/AFP) - French organisations representing publishers and authors said Wednesday they were
launching legal action against Facebook owner Meta, after their books were used to train generative AI applications.

The three groups -- publishers' outfit SNE and authors' and composers' groups SGDL and SNAC -- complained in a statement
of "massive use of copyrighted works without authorisation from their authors and publishers" by the American company.

"We have established the presence of many works published by SNE members in the body of data used by Meta," SNE chief
Vincent Montagne said in the statement.

Meta has acknowledged using a database, Books3, containing the full texts of around 200,000 books including some in
French to train its Llama large language model.

In a separate US court case launched by authors, the company admitted last year to using the database until 2023, claiming
that the AI training constituted "fair use" of the copyright-protected books.

French publishers and authors have not publicly communicated an estimated value of the harm to them by Meta.

Their case at the Paris judicial court "should lead to a serious desire emerging on the part of AIs to take the creative
industries into account," SGDL head Christophe Hardy said.

He called on AI developers to "respect the legal framework and, where relevant, find compensation for the use of works that
feed into" the technology.