Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc.

District court grants in part and denies in part Meta’s motion to dismiss claims under Digital Millennium Copyright Act and California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, finding that plaintiff book authors alleged sufficient injury for Article III standing and stated claim under DMCA but that plaintiffs’ CDAFA claim is preempted by Copyright Act. 

Plaintiffs, award-winning book authors, filed suit against Meta Platforms Inc. for training its artificial intelligence software Large Language Model Meta AI (LLaMA) using plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, alleging, among other claims, that Meta violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA). Meta moved to dismiss plaintiffs’ causes of action under the DMCA and the CDAFA, arguing that plaintiffs did not have standing to bring their DMCA claim and did not adequately allege claims under the DMCA or the CDAFA. 

The court denied Meta’s motion as to the DMCA claim, concluding that plaintiffs had Article III standing because they alleged that Meta removed copyright management information (CMI), which the court found was “a concrete injury for standing purposes,” and that plaintiffs further alleged that the removal of this CMI facilitated and concealed actual infringement of plaintiffs’ copyrights. The court reasoned that Meta’s removal of CMI constituted interference with a property right closely related to the “kind of property-based harms traditionally actionable in copyright.” 

The court rejected Meta’s argument that these injuries do not confer standing on plaintiffs because the DMCA protects different interests than does traditional copyright law, explaining that whether the DMCA seeks to prevent the exact injuries alleged by plaintiffs is a question separate from whether plaintiffs have alleged a concrete injury sufficient to confer standing. Article III standing requires that the traditional harm be closely related to the alleged injury, not necessarily the cause of action or the statute giving rise to the cause of action. While the DMCA’s purpose might be relevant to the merits of plaintiffs’ claim or to whether plaintiffs fall within the DMCA’s “zone of interests,” the DMCA’s purpose is not indicative of whether plaintiffs suffered a concrete injury for Article III standing purposes, according to the court. 

Noting that it is a “closer call,” the court also found that plaintiffs plausibly stated a claim under the DMCA, not by alleging that removal of CMI made plaintiffs’ books work better as training data but by alleging that Meta removed CMI to prevent LLaMA from outputting CMI and thus revealing that it was trained on copyrighted material. These allegations, the court found, raise “a reasonable, if not particularly strong, inference” that Meta removed the CMI in an attempt to prevent revealing that LLaMA was trained on copyrighted material. 

As to plaintiffs’ CDAFA claim, the court concluded that this claim was preempted by the Copyright Act because plaintiffs did not allege that Meta accessed their computers or servers—only their copyrighted books. Therefore, the court concluded, the CDAFA claim was based on the same rights that plaintiffs enjoyed under the Copyright Act. On this basis, the court dismissed plaintiffs’ CDAFA claim without leave to amend.

Summary prepared by Tal Dickstein and Jennifer Kahn