Judge: Pirate libraries may have profited from Meta torrenting 80TB of books

Now that Meta has largely beaten an AI training copyright lawsuit raised by 13 book authors—including comedian Sarah Silverman and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz—the only matter left to settle in that case is whether Meta violated copyright laws by torrenting books used to train Llama models.

In an order that partly grants Meta's motion for summary judgment, judge Vince Chhabria confirmed that Meta and the authors would meet on July 11 to "discuss how to proceed on the plaintiffs’ separate claim that Meta unlawfully distributed their protected works during the torrenting process."

Chhabria's order suggested that authors may struggle to win this part of the fight, too, due to a lack of evidence, as there has not yet been much discovery on this issue that was raised so late in the case. But he also warned that Meta was wrong to argue its torrenting was completely "irrelevant" to whether its copying of books was fair use.

Chhabria suggested the torrenting—which may have comprised more than 80.6 terabytes of data from one shadow library, LibGen—is "at least potentially relevant" in "a few different ways."

First, Chhabria noted that Meta deciding to pirate books from shadow libraries was "relevant to the issue of bad faith." That’s connected to the first factor of a fair use analysis, which weighs the character of the use.

Authors had argued that Meta had sparked conversations with some publishers about licensing authors' works, but "after failing to acquire licenses," CEO Mark Zuckerberg "escalated" the issue, Chhabria explained. That prompted a decision to acquire books from pirate libraries instead, Chhabria wrote, with Meta admittedly using BitTorrent to seize data after abandoning its pursuit of licensing deals for the same books.

However, that aspect of the trial may not matter much, since Chhabria noted that "the law is in flux about whether bad faith is relevant to fair use."