A recent court filing alleges that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg approved the use of pirated books to train the company’s AI model, Llama, despite internal warnings about the legality of the material. The claims emerge from a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by authors Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey in California federal court.
The lawsuit accuses Meta of misusing works from Library Genesis (LibGen), a shadow library offering unauthorized access to over 33 million books and 85 million articles. According to the authors, Zuckerberg approved the use of the LibGen dataset despite concerns from Meta’s AI team that it was “a dataset we know to be pirated.” Internal messages cited in court documents reveal hesitations among engineers about downloading the materials, with one noting, “Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right (smile emoji).”
In a dramatic twist, Meta disclosed incriminating internal documents just hours before the discovery deadline in December 2024, according to the plaintiffs. These documents suggest Meta engineers systematically stripped copyright information from the pirated books to prepare them for AI training. An internal memo also warned that public exposure of these actions could harm Meta’s negotiations with regulators.
Meta’s legal troubles are part of a broader wave of lawsuits targeting AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, accused of using copyrighted material without authorization to train large language models. While Zuckerberg distanced himself from the decision during a deposition, calling piracy “a bad thing,” the court filings paint a picture of a company prioritizing AI development over copyright compliance.
This controversy arrives at a pivotal moment for Meta’s AI ambitions. The company is racing to compete with OpenAI and Google, with its Llama model emerging as a significant player in the open-source AI landscape. However, the lawsuit raises questions about the ethical and legal boundaries of AI training practices.
As the legal battles unfold, the broader tech industry faces a reckoning on the use of copyrighted material in AI development. The courts’ decisions could shape the future of generative AI and its compliance with intellectual property laws.
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