1d ago

Meta staff torrented nearly 82TB of pirated books for AI training — court records reveal copyright violations

www.tomshardware.com Meta staff torrented nearly 82TB of pirated books for AI training — court records reveal copyright violations

Did they think they could get away with it?

Summary

Court records in an ongoing lawsuit reveal that Meta staff allegedly downloaded 81.7TB of pirated books from shadow libraries like Z-Library and LibGen to train its AI models.

Internal messages show employees raising ethical concerns, with one saying, “Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.”

Meta reportedly took steps to hide the activity.

The case is part of a broader debate on AI data sourcing, with similar lawsuits against OpenAI and Nvidia.

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47 comments

So long as we’re not just singling out Meta. They’ve all done it.
At least Meta, with its Llama model family, has enabled the open source LLM space to flourish (along with Mistral, AI2, Alibaba, Eleuther, and many others).
What-aboutism. I know. I’m okay with what’s happening here in the sense that in return we’ve gotten magical (compared to the SoTA five years ago) models with seemingly emergent reasoning capabilities and expertise in basically every domain. That’s huge, even if it’s started to feel normal.
The issue, of course, is creatives whose content was stolen now losing out on opportunities or revenue that they relied on, meaning fewer creatives in the future and more AI slop.
Not seeding is hilariously on-brand for Meta though. Maybe it’s the ‘possession < distribution’ defence?
- So long as we’re not just singling out Meta. They’ve all done it.
  They have to single out Meta for the narrative to work. Objectively, this is about major content owners, corporations, wanting a piece of something other people have created. That's a tough sell, so you have to spin a story.
  Not seeding is hilariously on-brand for Meta though. Maybe it’s the ‘possession < distribution’ defence?
  Sorta. AI training is clear-cut fair use, which is why you get manipulative stories like this one. What exactly do these out-of-context quotes say about the law? Nothing, but it serves the narrative.
  Actually seeding the content is problematic. If you knew that the downloaders had some legal purpose, that might work. But just sharing it is hard to justify.
  
  Yes, we know: the law is carefully crafted so that it's only illegal if WE do it.
  
  Yeah, that's one of the slogans they use to manipulate you. It's like the one going around before elections. Both parties are the same and so an outsider is needed, like Trump. How's that working out for the US right now?
  
  Curious how you defend a Big Tech company, you imagine a "they" who manipulate people (straight from the right wing book, or maybe you have a clear answer to who "they" are?), and then claim it's the same thing that got Trump in power.
  One could argue that what helped Trump a lot was Big Tech totally unchecked…
  
  you defend a Big Tech company
  Why lie about me? Oh well, when Ayn Rand's ideology is being passed off as socialism then I might as well be.
  you have a clear answer to who “they” are?
  Could I be talking about those corporations demanding money? Those rich, famous and well-connected people demanded their capitalist rents? Who knows? Big mystery.

47 comments