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

6pack · February 11, 2025, 5:43am

Source:

Facebook parent-company Meta is currently fighting a class action lawsuit alleging copyright infringement and unfair competition, among others, with regards to how it trained LLaMA. According to an X (formerly Twitter) post by vx-underground, court records reveal that the social media company used pirated torrents to download 81.7TB of data from shadow libraries including Anna’s Archive, Z-Library, and LibGen. It then used this information to train its AI models.

The evidence, in the form of written communication, shows the researchers’ concerns about Meta’s use of pirated materials. One senior AI researcher said way back in October 2022, “I don’t think we should use pirated material. I really need to draw a line here.” While another one said, “Using pirated material should be beyond our ethical threshold,” then they added, “SciHub, ResearchGate, LibGen are basically like PirateBay or something like that, they are distributing content that is protected by copyright and they’re infringing it.”
Then, in January 2023, Mark Zuckerberg himself attended a meeting where he said, “We need to move this stuff forward… we need to find a way to unblock all this.” Some three months later, a Meta employee sent a message to another one saying they were concerned about Meta IP addresses being used “to load through pirate content.” They also added, “torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right,” followed by laughing out loud emoji.

Aside from those messages, documents also revealed that the company took steps so that its infrastructure wasn’t used in these downloading and seeding operations so that the activity wouldn’t be traced back to Meta. The court documents say that this constitutes evidence of Meta’s unlawful activity, which seems like it’s taking deliberate steps to circumvent copyright laws.

Laws are for the poor…

MenaceG · May 16, 2025, 5:17pm

Thats straight up hypocrisy!

Naveen_Reloaded · May 16, 2025, 5:20pm

So ? Are they going to untrain the AI ?
Even if they ban , these companies will simply sell them to another company and profit.

MenaceG · May 16, 2025, 5:27pm

I do think they should just reconstruct the copyright regulations, for everyone…

cellar_door · May 16, 2025, 8:45pm

If this somehow gets Anna’s Archive taken down I am gonna be really mad. Thats my source for all my epubs

Maybe I should stack up the kindle while I have the chance lol

EDIT Completely legal and non copyrighted epubs! Totally nothing to do with Piracy.

DrFreeman · May 17, 2025, 1:45am

one of us!! one of us!!