IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT NEWS: Entrepreneur magazine accuses Meta of copyright infringement to train AI, (Nov 7, 2025)

By Jonathan Anderson

The suit alleges direct copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement, and violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The publisher of Entrepreneur magazine sued Facebook parent Meta for allegedly stealing hundreds of copyrighted works owned by the media company to train large language models (LLMs) for artificial intelligence (AI). The complaint advances three causes of action: direct copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement, and violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The suit seeks declaratory and injunctive relief in addition to actual and statutory damages (Entrepreneur Media, LLC v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 5:25-cv-09579-BLF (N.D. Cal. filed Nov. 6, 2025)).

Complaint. On Nov. 6, 2025, Entrepreneur Media, LLC filed a complaint against Meta Platforms, Inc. in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The plaintiff, which publishes Entrepreneur magazine and other business-related media, accused Meta of pirating “at least hundreds of copyrighted works owned by Entrepreneur,” including books, magazine issues, and individual articles. Entrepreneur accused Meta, which owns social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, of stealing the material to train LLMs capable of generating naturalistic text.

Citing internal Meta communications, the complaint alleges that Meta obtained Entrepreneur’s copyrighted works through so-called “shadow libraries” containing pirated works. Entrepreneur alleges that Meta “deliberately concealed the training datasets used for models.”

Because of Meta’s conduct, Entrepreneur alleges that its digital book sales have declined and must now compete against LLMs that were built using Entrepreneur’s own protected works. The complaint states that Entrepreneur would have “welcomed good-faith negotiations to license its copyrighted works for AI training purposes.”

Direct copyright infringement. Count one alleges direct copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501. The complaint alleges that Meta infringed on the exclusive rights of Entrepreneur by downloading and copying pirated works from shadow libraries such as LibGen and Z-Lib, made multiple unauthorized copies of these pirated datasets, and stored them on local and external servers.

Contributory copyright infringement. Count two alleges contributory copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501 and federal common law. The complaint alleges that Meta used torrenting protocols to download the infringing works from pirated sources, and that the company’s “willful infringement materially contributed to and induced further infringement of Entrepreneur’s copyrights” by making the infringed works available through peer-to-peer file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent and LibTorrent.

Violation of Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Count three alleges violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act under 17 U.S.C. § 1202. The complaint alleges that Meta extracted text embedded in files containing Entrepreneur’s works and “programmatically discarded front-matter pages and embedded metadata, thereby intentionally removing or altering” copyright management information (CMI) from the infringed works before writing the text to training datasets.

Relief sought. The complaint seeks a judgment in favor of Entrepreneur and against Meta and a declaration that Meta willfully infringed on Entrepreneur’s exclusive copyrights. The suit also seeks a permanent injunction enjoining Meta from further infringing conduct and an injunction prohibiting removal or alteration of CMI from Entrepreneur’s works, and requiring preservation or restoration of CMI and maintenance of provenance logs in any ingestion, preprocessing, or retraining. Entrepreneur further seeks actual and statutory damages, interest, and attorneys’ fees.

The Case is No. 5:25-cv-09579-BLF.

Judge: Freeman, B.

Attorneys: Moez M. Kaba (Hueston Hennigan LLP) for Entrepreneur Media, LLC.

Companies: Entrepreneur Media, LLC; Meta Platforms, Inc.

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