Court documents show not only did Meta torrent terabytes of pirated books to train AI models, employees wouldn't stop emailing each other about it: 'Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right'
First reported by Ars Technica, the copyright case against Facebook parent company Meta over its use of authors' work to train large language models has unearthed some embarrassing dirty laundry in discovery. Dozens of emails, allegedly between Meta employees, discuss torrenting massive amounts of pirated material—and seeding those torrents to boot—in order to train the company's AI models.
It was revealed via court documents last month that Meta had obtained AI training data from LibGen, a large file sharing database that includes everything from paywalled news and academic articles, to whole books. The prosecution alleges that Meta downloaded over 80 terabytes from LibGen and another so-called «shadow library» by the name of Z-Library. This is, to be clear, internet piracy on a scale that would make a Nintendo lawyer blush, and the lawsuit alleges the emails put in writing «Meta’s decision to take and use copyrighted works without permission that it knew to be pirated, despite clear ethical concerns.»
One of the emails in evidence quotes an alleged Meta employee futilely advising that «using pirated material should be beyond our ethical threshold» before arguing that databases like LibGen «are basically like PirateBay or something like that, they are distributing content that is protected by copyright and they're infringing it.»
There are repeated examples of emails ascribed to Meta employees flagging the use of LibGen as a concern, either in failed «lone sane man fashion,» or in the context of hiding the activity. One researcher proposed only accessing LibGen through a VPN, and later joked that «torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right
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