Authors say emails show ‘magnitude of Meta’s unlawful torrenting’

In the US, Meta emails show ‘the magnitude of Meta’s unlawful torrenting scheme’, according to a filing by a group of authors suing Meta for copyright infringement in relation to the company’s training of its AI systems.

Technology news site Ars Technica reports that the emails show Meta torrented ‘at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries through the site Anna’s Archive, including at least 35.7 terabytes of data from Z-Library and LibGen’, according to the authors’ court filing.

The emails show Meta research engineer Nikolay Bashlykov consulted with Meta’s legal team in September 2023, emphasising in an email that ‘using torrents would entail “seeding” the files—i.e., sharing the content outside’, adding that ‘this could be legally not OK’.

According to Ars Technica, Meta has previously addressed its torrenting in a motion to dismiss filed in January, telling the court that ‘plaintiffs do not plead a single instance in which any part of any book was, in fact, downloaded by a third party from Meta via torrent, much less that Plaintiffs’ books were somehow distributed by Meta’.

However, the technology news site reports: ‘While Meta may be confident in its legal strategy despite the new torrenting wrinkle, the social media company has seemingly complicated its case by allowing authors to expand the distribution theory that’s key to winning a direct copyright infringement claim beyond just claiming that Meta’s AI outputs unlawfully distributed their works.’

As previously reported, a group of authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Sarah Silverman is suing Meta for copyright infringement, alleging CEO Mark Zuckerberg approved the use of pirated books to train Meta’s AI systems.

A judge previously dismissed part of a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by authors including Silverman against Meta, regarding its large language model Llama.

Category: International news