By Kim Pawlak

On July 2, 2026, a class action lawsuit was filed against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg on behalf of textbook authors whose copyrighted textbooks were used without authorization or compensation to train its large language model (LLM), Llama. Lead plaintiffs in the case are mathematics textbook author Michael Sullivan, anatomy and physiology textbook author Kenneth Saladin, finance textbook authors Zvi Bodie and Alan J. Marcus, anatomy and physiology textbook author Kevin Patton, and business communication textbook author Dana Loewy. Sullivan is also TAA Board Treasurer, Patton is a Past TAA Board President, and Saladin and Loewy are long-time TAA members.

The suit, filed by Archstone Law Group, P.C, Slarskey LLC, and Gaw | Poe LLP, claims that in using plaintiffs’ and the class’s copyrighted textbooks to train Llama, it pirated them from “shadow library” sources, removed copyright-management information from them, and reproduced and distributed them to others while torrenting them.

The filing focuses on the distinctive nature of textbooks in that “Textbooks are reviewed and selected by instructors and through formal adoption processes, are typically updated, revised, and published in successive editions on a regular basis, and are commercialized in educational markets that fundamentally differ from the markets for trade books and scholarly works.”

According to the complaint, “The market for textbooks and the risk that AI models trained on textbooks will substitute for and dilute that market turns in part upon evidence of textbook adoption, revision economics, and customer purchasing decisions that are unique to textbook authors as compared to other categories of authors.”

In addition to asking the court to certify it as a class action, the suit is also asking for statutory or actual damages and defendants’ profits, and permanent injunction against any further infringement of plaintiffs’ and class members’ textbooks.

Read the full complaint