Summary
Court records in an ongoing lawsuit reveal that Meta staff allegedly downloaded 81.7TB of pirated books from shadow libraries like Z-Library and LibGen to train its AI models.
Internal messages show employees raising ethical concerns, with one saying, “Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.”
Meta reportedly took steps to hide the activity.
The case is part of a broader debate on AI data sourcing, with similar lawsuits against OpenAI and Nvidia.
I guess they should have just borrowed them from the library.
So long as we’re not just singling out Meta. They’ve all done it.
At least Meta, with its Llama model family, has enabled the open source LLM space to flourish (along with Mistral, AI2, Alibaba, Eleuther, and many others).
What-aboutism. I know. I’m okay with what’s happening here in the sense that in return we’ve gotten magical (compared to the SoTA five years ago) models with seemingly emergent reasoning capabilities and expertise in basically every domain. That’s huge, even if it’s started to feel normal.
The issue, of course, is creatives whose content was stolen now losing out on opportunities or revenue that they relied on, meaning fewer creatives in the future and more AI slop.
Not seeding is hilariously on-brand for Meta though. Maybe it’s the ‘possession < distribution’ defence?
I said this in another thread on this subject- this is a very clear violation of the Berne Convention and Meta could find itself in court all over the world because of this.
https://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/
Probably not, but I can hope.
That is an insane amount of data. I’m trying to fathom what 82TB of text files looks like and I can’t.
So… if we say every ebook is 10mb (that’s well into the high end, only a few are that big)
That’s 8,589,934 10mb books.
AI says the average public library in the USA has 116,481 items (but that includes all media formats), but if we go with that, then 82 TB is about 73.74 average sized libraries with no repeating content.
NYPL has around 10 million books and an additional 10 million manuscripts in its collection. Over 54 million total articles for lending.
Not the largest by far, but still mind boggling in size.
To torrent and ingest something of that size is crazy.
Damn, that’s huge.
Never seen a library that big before. The university here has about 1.5 million and that’s a big library.
Time for the ol’ slap-on-the-wrist few million dollar settlement, or whatever amount Facebook makes in a day; if the courts even bother to function at this point.
Make it a royalty, until the data stops being used keep on paying.
So the “don’t be evil” crowd casually torrented 82TB of shadow library data through corporate hardware. Internal messages show researchers knew it crossed ethical lines, yet Zuck personally greenlit circumventing copyright. The cognitive dissonance of building AI empires on pirated foundations would be poetic if it weren’t so predictably dystopian.
This isn’t oversight—it’s systemic rot. Fines become tax-deductible line items while lobbyists ensure regulatory capture. When your legal team costs more than the penalties, infringement transforms into R&D strategy. The only surprise is anyone still pretending capital understands “ethics” beyond PR gymnastics.
Meanwhile indie authors get demonetized for quoting haikus. But sure, let’s investigate if open models borrowed a few ChatGPT outputs. Nothing accelerates innovation quite like megacorps rewriting IP law through sheer audacity.
“Don’t be evil” was Google, and they abandoned that motto a while ago in favor of “think of the shareholders!”
As soon as they became a publicly tradable company they are obligated, by the Dodge v Ford ruling, to only maximize shareholder value. Being not evil isn’t an option.
No matter what kind of company you are, you have an obligation to follow the laws of whatever jurisdictions you’re doing business in.
Also, there’s actually a lot of leeway in regards to doing your fiduciary duty to your shareholders. You’re not obligated to maximize short term profits at the expense of long term (ie by retaining skilled employees). That’s usually just a shitty board trying to suck as much money out of a company as possible and a CEO who doesn’t want to get fired by the board.
I mean the whole metaverse thing was a long term play to capture a future market, which involved a lot of RnD money they just decided to light it on fire instead of making a useful product.
Seed it Mark you asshole!
He can’t, the seed is stored in what Mark lacks!
Remember Aaron Swartz? Do you think Zuck will go to prison too?
lolno. Fuckerberg won’t see the inside of a prison cell. He’s what we like to call in the law industry, “rich”
yes, he’ll be tormented by the feds to the point he’ll take his own life.
Odds of severe punishment? Slim.
Word on the street is that they might be facing almost a dollar per petabyte.
Street value $8.7 trillion
Odds of
severepunishment?SlimNone.
Rules for thee, not for me.
I’m mostly upset that this puts z-library and libgen back high up on the anti-pirating enforcers radar
It’s fucked these guys can pirate all this shit and make money off it. But if the masses access it, shut it the fuck down! Break encryption! Curb the laws! Penalize! Penalize! Penalize!
As much as I hate much of the news about AI, I love the dilemma this puts the copyright lawyers and tech bros in. Either they admit that the majority of copyright law enforcement is a joke and stifles innovation - or they admit the creation of AI using stolen works is standard practise and requires government intervention to get back on track.
“When they do it it’s progress - when you do it it’s piracy”
And guess what will happen as a result of these discoveries - nothing.
only if you’re rich like fuckerberg. If you’re a poor person, straight to the execution chamber
That is like all of the books…
Yeah, they’re not exactly large in file size.
