IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT—N.D. Cal.: DMCA claims against Meta’s artificial intelligence venture survive a standing challenge, (Mar 18, 2025)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

But the decision avoids the hotly debated question over the relation of DMCA and copyright claims when it comes to “concrete injury.”

Author Sarah Silverman and her fellow plaintiffs were entitled to pursue their DMCA claim against Meta Platforms because they plausibly alleged that the social media giant stripped their copyright management information from the materials it ingested in order to ensure that users of its artificial intelligence service remained in the dark about the unlicensed uses, the federal court for San Francisco has held. But the court, in wading into the growing debate over the application of Article III standing under the DMCA, deftly dodged the question of whether DMCA claims protected against harms that were analogous to those protected by the Copyright Act—a question that has been hotly contested in the federal courts since a landmark 2021 Supreme Court decision (Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 1:21-cv-01840-TJK (N.D. Cal. Mar. 7, 2025)).

The decision is the latest federal court opinion to address DMCA standing in the wake of Transunion v. Ramirez, 94 U.S. 413 (2021), a Supreme Court decision narrowing the “concrete injury” prong of Article III standing to those harms “traditionally recognized as providing a basis for a lawsuit in American courts.” The first came in Raw Story Media, Inc. v. OpenAI, Inc., another artificial intelligence case then pending in the Southern District of New York. There, news organizations claimed that OpenAI removed their copyright management information, in violation of Section 1202(b)(1) of the DMCA, before feeding their news stories into their training databases. In this case, which drew widespread attention from the copyright community, Judge Colleen McMahon concluded that neither the removal of the CMI on its own—nor the bare possibility that copies of the stories lacking that CMI would be shown to ChatGPT users—was enough to constitute the “concrete injury in fact” necessary for standing.

In the months since that opinion, two different federal courts—one in Manhattan and another in Northern California—have come to different conclusions. In The Intercept Media, Inc. v. OpenAI, Inc., Judge Rakoff found that a similar DMCA asserted an injury cognizable under Article III because it vindicated a property interest that was historically analogous to a copyright infringement claim. (Perhaps notably, Judge Rakoff did not acknowledge the contrary authority on the same Manhattan bench.) More recently, in Viral DRM LLC v. Seven West Media Ltd., Judge Orrick of the San Francisco bench also rejected a standing challenge to a DMCA claim.

Standing in Meta case. Now another San Francisco judge, Vince Chhabria, has thrown his hat into the mix. In two class action lawsuits (here and here), comedian and writer Sarah Silverman along with other fellow book authors targeted OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA. Meta challenged the DMCA claim on standing grounds—but the court rejected the challenge.

Notably, while the court’s decision acknowledged the Intercept and Raw Story precedents, it charted a somewhat different course in reaching its result. Meta argued, following the Raw Story rationale, that the DMCA claim did not provide standing because the DMCA protected different interests than traditional copyright law. It was “not clear” Meta was right about this, the court found—but it also didn’t matter. Here, the court noted, the plaintiffs did not plausibly allege that Meta’s CMI removal enabled or facilitated infringement. However, the court noted, the plaintiffs did allege that Meta removed CMI “to try to prevent Llama from outputting CMI and thus revealing that it was trained on copyrighted material.” This use of copyrighted material, the court noted, was “clearly an identifiable (alleged) infringement.” Standing could easily be found as a result, the court reasoned.

The Case is No. 1:21-cv-01840-TJK.

Judge: Chhabria, V.

Attorneys: Joseph R. Saveri (Joseph Saveri Law Firm, LLP) for Richard Kadrey. Bobby A. Ghajar (Cooley LLP) for Meta Platforms, Inc.

Companies: Meta Platforms, Inc.

Cases: AINews Copyright TechnologyInternet CaliforniaNews