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.
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.
Jammie Thomas had to pay over $9000 per song she shared on Kazaa and that was like 15 years ago. Inflation + millions of shares should mean billions of dollars owed to the publishers… Plus obviously deleting or forfeiting ownership of all the models trained on that data, naturally.
Make it a royalty, until the data stops being used keep on paying.