Chicken Soup for the Soul, LLC v. Meta Platforms Inc.

The Plaintiff is Chicken Soup for the Soul, LLC which owns the iconic Chicken Soup for the Soul literary franchise, described as one of the most successful non-fiction book series in modern publishing history. The Complaint describes how, since 1993, the series has grown into a global phenomenon with hundreds of titles and more than 500 million books sold worldwide. The Complaint contends that for decades, these books have been curated and edited to present compelling narrative structures and expressive prose that resonate across cultures and generations.

The Complaint alleges that rather than obtaining licences or paying for use of these works, each Defendant downloaded pirated copies of Plaintiff's books from shadow library websites (including The Pile, LibGen, Z-Library, and Anna's Archive) and then reproduced, parsed, analysed, re-copied, used, and embedded those works into their large language models to accelerate commercial development. The Complaint contends that Defendants targeted Plaintiff's works because they were of exceptional value as training data, acknowledging internally and publicly that long-form, high-quality books are the "gold-standard" training material for large language models.

The Complaint alleges that the Chicken Soup for the Soul series is particularly valuable because each volume contains dozens of tightly edited, first-person narratives written in natural, conversational language that conveys emotion, moral reflection, and coherent storytelling in concise form. These characteristics allegedly make the series uniquely well-suited for training large language models to replicate authentic human voice, narrative pacing, emotional tone, and story structure.

The Complaint contends that infringement occurred at least twice for every work: first, when Defendants obtained Plaintiff's copyrighted books from illegal shadow libraries, and second, when Defendants made additional unlicensed copies during ingestion, preprocessing, and model training processes. The Complaint alleges that Defendants' misconduct was wilful, as the shadow libraries had been subject to criminal prosecutions, civil lawsuits, and widespread warnings within the technology industry for years.

The Complaint asserts a single cause of action for copyright infringement under federal law. Plaintiff seeks monetary damages and injunctive relief to remedy what it characterises as systematic piracy of its valuable copyrighted works.