“It seems kind of messed up,” he said. “The question, as the courts tell us over and over again, is not whether something is messed up but whether it’s copyright infringement.”
Judge Chhabria told Meta that obliterating the market for authors’ work is hard to call fair use. He also doubted the authors could prove harm to Sarah Silverman’s memoir. Meta does not deny pulling the books from shadow libraries. Its whole defense is fair use.