Meta is being accused of violating copyright laws through its admitted torrenting of a pirated books dataset utilized for training its AI models, according to a summary judgment filing in a US district court in California reported by ArsTechnica.
Meta faces copyright allegations over torrenting
In their legal filing, the authors argued that “whatever the merits of generative artificial intelligence, or GenAI, stealing copyrighted works off the Internet for one’s own benefit has always been unlawful.” They alleged that Meta decided to torrent terabytes of pirated book data, claiming that downloading pirated books individually “posed an immense strain on Meta’s networks and proceeded very slowly.”
The authors accused Meta of being aware of the legal implications, stating that the company took a risk by hoping to evade detection while needing faster access to large datasets in the competitive AI landscape. The filing indicated that Meta attempted to conceal its torrenting activities by using Amazon Web Services.
The authors contended that in most torrenting scenarios, users who download also upload the files to enable faster sharing. They asserted, “In this case too, users who download via torrent also upload the same file they are downloading.” They further argued that even if Meta limited seeding after downloads, its leeching during the downloading process implies the sharing of pirated books.
According to the authors, “There is no genuine dispute that Meta made widely available and even reuploaded to other online pirates at least some quantity of the pirated data as part of the peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing process.” They criticized Meta’s defense, stating that the company believed it should not be held to the same standards as others engaged in illegal activities.
The authors referred to Meta’s defense as the “Bob Dylan defense,” citing lyrics from Dylan’s “Sweetheart Like You” to illustrate their point: “Steal a little and they throw you in jail / Steal a lot and they make you king.”
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Meta has contested the claims related to leeching, arguing that the authors should not be permitted further discovery or to introduce new expert testimony regarding the alleged leeching. They have claimed that the authors’ motion for summary judgment based on this theory is inappropriate since Meta has not had a chance to defend against it.
Judge Vince Chhabria is set to evaluate these claims in a hearing scheduled for May 1. Chhabria has expressed his intention to consider whether ruling on the summary judgment at this stage might be unfair to Meta.
The authors insist that torrenting pirated works is sufficiently illegal to warrant a clear case of copyright infringement, stating, “Meta’s reproduction of Plaintiffs’ Copyrighted Books without permission, including through peer-to-peer file sharing, is not fair use.” They referenced a major ruling against Napster to support their claim that Meta infringed each author’s copyrights.
The authors also highlighted that the data Meta allegedly pirated included works by at least ten Supreme Court justices, aiming to emphasize the broader implications of Meta’s actions. They have requested additional discovery to compel Meta to provide answers regarding its torrenting and leeching practices, including depositions of Meta employees such as Mark Zuckerberg.
In their argument, they noted that the risk associated with taking copyrighted works from pirated databases was significant enough to escalate matters to Meta’s executives, including Zuckerberg. “Their gamble should not pay off,” the authors stated.
Meta responded by deeming the authors’ new discovery requests as “unnecessary, unwarranted, and infeasible.” The company has offered to allow the deposition of six employees but rejected requests for additional time with Zuckerberg, suggesting alternative senior staff who could speak on executive decision-making.
The authors pointed out perceived gaps in the understanding of Meta’s torrenting by the court, alleging that Meta’s expert had failed to replicate the torrenting in her analysis and did not account for how data uploading occurs during the leeching phase. They consider their leeching theory critical to their case and anticipate that the court may evaluate fair-use factors, although they recognize these are typically decided by juries, not at the summary judgment stage.
Despite these complexities, the authors assert that the use of piracy cannot qualify as fair use, stating, “The use of piracy to further piracy can never be ‘fair use.'” They contend that Meta’s actions, including making millions of copyrighted books available for faster download speeds, constitute clear copyright infringement.
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