A group of authors, including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Sarah Silverman, alleged in a court filing that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg approved “Meta’s torrenting and processing of pirated copyrighted works” to train the company’s AI models.
The California filing, which was made public on Wednesday, claims that Zuckerberg supported the use of the LibGen dataset, an archive that originated in Russia and contains a library of pirated books, to train its Llama AI. In a document submitted to the court, Meta admitted that it “removed [ed] all the copyright paragraphs from the beginning and the end” of scientific journal articles, Engadget reported. The suit alleges that this was explicitly done to hide the fact that Meta was using copyrighted materials.
Clearly, Meta did not want this information to be made public. The Guardianreported that the filing stated: “Media coverage suggesting we have used a dataset we know to be pirated, such as LibGen, …