Five major publishers and Scott Turow sue Meta over alleged pirated training data for Llama

This is the largest publisher-side AI training case to date by plaintiff weight: five publishing houses plus a name-brand author (Scott Turow) attacking not just unauthorized ingestion but also removal of copyright management information (CMI). The CMI angle is legally distinctive — it adds a DMCA §1202 vector on top of straight infringement, which has tended to produce more reliable damages than fair-use-bounded copyright claims.

Meta is also exposed on a separate flank. r/LocalLLaMA's 1,584-upvote thread documents the Heretic project being served with a legal notice by Meta, Inc. — Meta simultaneously playing IP defendant against publishers and IP plaintiff against open-source AI tooling is a juxtaposition critics are seizing on. The company also opened an ads-focused MCP server letting AI agents automate media-buyer workflows across its ad platform, racing Anthropic's MCP ecosystem on the commercial side.

And the human cost is in the headlines: an r/singularity thread (1,100 upvotes) covered Meta's 8,000-person layoff round (~10% of workforce) explicitly tied to AI restructuring — fueling the broader labor narrative that Newsom's California order is responding to.

What to watch: whether the publisher suit goes to a fair-use ruling on the merits or settles, and whether the CMI removal claims survive motion practice. Either outcome will set a precedent every frontier lab — not just Meta — will be reading carefully.