Five more authors sue Meta, alleging Llama and Muse were trained on pirated copies and bulk-scanned books

What happened

On October 19, 2026, Paul Levine, Nittany Valley Productions, Inc., Abraham Acosta, Richard Wilson and Romanus Wolter filed a 53-page complaint against Meta Platforms, Inc. in the Northern District of California (No. 3:26-cv-12137), demanding a jury trial.

What the complaint alleges

• Meta downloaded pirated copies of the plaintiffs' works from shadow libraries, often by torrenting, and used them to train its Llama models; torrenting also re-uploaded copyrighted material to peer-to-peer networks.
• From around mid-2025, Meta bought physical books in bulk, scanned them, ran the images through optical character recognition and used the text to train its Muse models, including Muse Spark and Muse Glimmer, in an operation the complaint calls Project Vellum.
• Meta stripped copyright management information from the works and, the complaint says, could and should have paid for licences instead of feeding from "the dark market for digitally available copyrighted materials".

Context

The suit was filed the same day as Older et al. v. Meta (57 plaintiffs, No. 3:26-cv-12115), already covered as a separate item; Levine is a distinct complaint with different plaintiffs and its own case number. Both were referred to Judge Vince Chhabria for a relatedness determination with Kadrey v. Meta. All allegations are unproven; no court has ruled on them.