‘Neo-Nazi Madness’: Meta’s Top AI Lawyer on Why He Fired the Company
He’s not a famous name in the wider world, but copyright lawyer Mark Lemley is equal parts revered and feared within certain tech circles. TechDirt recently described him as a “Lebron James/Michael Jordan”-level legal thinker. A professor at Stanford, counsel at an IP-focused law firm in the Bay Area, and one of the 10 most-cited legal scholars of all time, Lemley is exactly the kind of person Silicon Valley heavyweights want on their side. Meta, however, has officially lost him.
Earlier this month, Lemley announced he was no longer going to defend the tech giant in Kadrey v. Meta, a lawsuit filed by a group of authors who allege the tech giant violated copyright law by training its AI tools on their books without their permission. The fact that he quit is a big deal. I wondered if it had something to do with how the case was going—but then I checked social media.
Lemley said on LinkedIn and Bluesky that he still believes Meta should win the lawsuit, and he wasn’t bowing out because of the merits of the case. Instead, he’d “fired” Meta because of what he characterized as the company and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness.” The move came on the heels of major policy shifts at Meta, including changes to its hateful conduct rules that now allow users to call gay and trans people “mentally ill.”
