Nearly 300 authors skip class action to sue Meta solo

Nearly 300 authors filed copyright infringement claims against Meta Platforms on October 19 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, according to Publishers Weekly, alleging the company trained its AI models on pirated books and, later, on physical books it bought and scanned without a license. The claims are spread across five complaints - Winspear, Levine, Reno, Sheard and Older v. Meta Platforms - with authors divided among them largely for logistical reasons, all making substantially the same allegations.

Attorney Kyle Roche of Freedman Normand Friedland told Publishers Weekly his firm currently represents more than 2,200 authors and plans to file up to 1,000 individual claims by the end of the year. Roche is working alongside Elizabeth Brannen of Stris & Maher. All of the authors signed up through ClaimsHero, a platform that partnered with the two firms last fall to recruit authors to opt out of the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement and sue independently.

The complaint alleges Meta downloaded books from shadow libraries including LibGen, Z-Library and Anna's Archive, plus the Books3 dataset, often via BitTorrent, and stripped copyright notices from the files. It also alleges that starting around mid-2025, Meta ran a book-scanning program called Project Vellum, buying physical books in bulk and scanning them to train its Muse Spark and Muse Glimmer models, released in April and August 2026. Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said the Guild supports the suit while maintaining its preference for "well-conceived class action lawsuits."

Here's the number that frames everything: the Anthropic settlement pays roughly $3,000 per work. These Meta plaintiffs are explicitly aiming higher, pointing to the Copyright Act's statutory damages ceiling of up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement. Roche called this the case Congress had in mind when it set that threshold. That's the whole calculation in one sentence - trade the certainty of a class payout for the chance at a jury-sized number.

Pay attention to the Project Vellum detail, because it's the sharpest argument in the complaint. Meta allegedly bought physical books starting around mid-2025 and scanned them to train Muse Spark and Muse Glimmer. Brannen's classroom analogy - ripping the spine off a book you bought one copy of and handing out copies to everyone - is doing real work here, because it draws a bright line between owning a copy and owning the right to reproduce it. That's a cleaner story for a jury than scraping pirate sites, and it's worth watching whether it lands differently with a judge too.

Rasenberger's statement is worth sitting with rather than skating past. She's praising this suit for taking on the scanning operation "as an independent act of infringement," and in the same breath saying authors need class actions to protect everyone. Both things are true in her statement. I'm not going to pretend that tension resolves itself - it doesn't, and you shouldn't expect it to.

What to actually do this week: if you're weighing whether to join a class settlement or pursue something else, read Winspear's argument that class settlements resolve claims "for pennies on the dollar" alongside Rasenberger's case for collective action, and treat it as a live, unresolved question - not a decided one. More complaints are coming by year's end. Watch for how the next batch frames the scanning claims specifically.